laceblade | PHONES

I believe your assumption is correct!

I would recommend you go to a phone shop and try both, see which of the interfaces you like better. I actually had plans to switch to Droid from iPhone because it was a bit cheaper (though not as much as I thought it was going to be), but when I tried them out I realized that I am so used to, and so happy with, the iPhone interface that it wouldn't have been worth the bother. Also, Droid seem to have much smaller amounts of hard drive space than iPhones (I have the 32GB), and this matters to me because I like to keep a good library of music and vids on my phone.

I think GB won't matter to me - I have an iPod that I <3 and use all the time, but actually testing them out is probably a good call and something I probably wouldn't have done, lol.

Your assumption: about 92% true! I have a cheap-ass Android phone and I think it will do all those things, but, it has a truly laughable amount of memory (I have a dozen apps on there and it's always asking me to delete stuff because I'm out of memory), and it crashes a lot. Also it runs a really old version of Android and won't upgrade to a newer version; I don't think it's fast enough for that.

Android is an operating system, Droid is a specific line of phones that runs the Android operating system. There are lots of Android phones that aren't Droids, in other words, so you don't have to get an iPhone to avoid the sexist advertising. (You can if you want!)

A new version of the Android OS (4.1) was just released last week, so if you're interested in an Android phone, see if you can find out if the phone you're interested in will get the upgrade and when. (You may not be able to find this out. But don't get a phone running Android 2.1 or something, is what I'm saying.)

Also it's a good idea to experiment to see whether you prefer a slide-out hardware keyboard or a touch-screen keyboard -- I LOVE that my phone has a texting keyboard, for all the other stuff I dislike about it. I don't like touch-screen keyboards.

Sorry, I keep thinking of more stuff to add...

Edited (Hit post too soon) 2012-07-13 03:11 (UTC)

Ahh, I was using "droid" as shorthand for "Android," not realizing that they were actually two different things in this case. Now I will seem less stupid when I go to a phone store, bwahaha.

I suppose that I have a slide-out keyboard on my cheap phone right now, and am very accustomed to it. Having a touch-screen keyboard would be hard! This is a good thing to consider :O

I 2nd futuransky's suggestion to try them out, if you can. Another thing you can play around with at the phone store is whether you want a hardware keyboard or not. Tho' i've been told hardware keyboards are on their way out, which saddens me greatly because they will pry my hardware keyboard out of my cold dead hands (i txt A LOT and find the hardware keyboard so much easier than an on-screen keyboard).

If you have specific apps you're interested in using (e.g., Crunchyroll), definitely check in advance to see if it's available on the platform you're considering. I tried one of the new Windows Phones earlier in the year, and it was a NIGHTMARE in part because so many apps i wanted weren't available for the new platform yet.

From your list above, the other thing i'd consider is how you want to write notes to yourself. I use Evernote for a lot of things (i was always buying the wrong vitamins, so i finally just took a pic of the damn bottle and uploaded it to Evernote), and am really pleased with the Evernote app for Android. On my old Windows Mobile phone i used the native note app for quick To Do lists. For lists of shit i want to buy (or the list of zines i already own, for when i'm browsing tables at a zine fest), i tend to put things into an Excel spreadsheet so it's more list-y and sortable by various fields. Just giving examples, here, of how i make notes to myself and then access them on my phone.

Is it still impossible to open an iPhone and put in a new battery? I kept my old Windows Mobile phone going for 4 years because i was able to replace the battery.

Oh, the other thing i'd look into would be reports on how long the battery lasts. My new phone (an HTC something Android) needs to be recharged basically every night if i'm using apps regularly thru'out the day. I'd prefer better battery life, but Andy had an iPhone for 2 years and tells me that recharging every night was about what he expected when he switched over to these new HTC phones.

Umm, CNet.com has phone reviews. I thoroughly researched the CRAP out of my Windows Mobile before i got it years ago, and the CNet reviews were really, really helpful in narrowing my choice.

I am accustomed to a hardware keyboard! I'll test out a touch-screen in the store, maybe.

Good call re: Crunchyroll app. I'll see which phones/OSs support its app; I think the other apps that I want are so basic that any phone will have them.

CNet.com! I always forget that sites like this exist ;_;

ty for all of this info, it is very helpful.
I might/probably will have a separate post about apps once I have purchased the phone.

I use cheapy phones, asyouknowblade, and I can't say enough about the sturdy and well-designed LG phones. One could indeed have an LG phone running Android.

(One of the joys of the iPhone is so many fewer choices.)

But any Android can handle the basics, and the closer the device's OS is to current Android, the better. (Maybe somebody with high tech skills can improve on this answer, but it seems like it's hard to update the OS on an Android device.)

ETA: Most smart phones are shown with onscreen keyboard only, I've seen some which are longer: they have the largish screen plus a Blackberry-like keyboard. I started w a slide and now I'd never go back: the Palm-style keyboard is way faster.

Daughter of ETA: In addition to Evernote, there's a cool service called Dropbox. It constantly syncs a folder on your desktop with the cloud. There are Dropbox apps for your phone, too, so you can read or listen to or view pix of those files in your Dropbox cloud folder. You can ever serve files to other folks.

Edited (responding to wrdnrd's excellent stuff.) 2012-07-13 03:22 (UTC)

An Android phone will prompt you to upgrade the OS when an upgrade comes out...

or not.

Some phones get the new Android version faster than others; some phones stop getting new Android versions at a certain point. (Mine hasn't seen an update since Dec. 2010. I bought the phone in early 2011.) It may be partially a hardware-requirement thing and partially a planned-obsolescence thing.

It may be partially a hardware-requirement thing and partially a planned-obsolescence thing.

It also has to do with your carrier, and whether or not they lock down/make proprietary changes to the OS in some way. We bought one of the Google phones (Samsung Nexus S) largely because Google's deal with carriers means that AT&T (for instance) cannot slap their AT&T crap all over the OS, lock it down, or block updates.

That said - our phones up until this week were running Android 2.3, b/c AT&T has successfully delayed OS updates on these phones, because... they're jerks? IDK. However, we were able to update our OS to 4.0 very, very easily and without rooting (jailbreaking) the phone. We just had to go be educated users about that.

I second Evernote, it's so helpful and it syncs with things you write on your computer at home/the web so if you write a grocery list at home and sync before you go to the grocery store, you can have your list handy on your mobile device.

Side note to

jesse_the_k: thanks for the info on dropbox. I got invited to it a while ago but didn't really know what it did. Now I'm definitely more interested in it.

Ahh, syncing Evernote on the web sounds really nice. Currently, I keep cute paper pads at work, but my purse & desk-at-home are full of LISTS with things crossed off, or abandoned, or etc. SO MUCH PAPER.

Yup, that sounds exactly like me and the reason i went to Evernote. PAPER EVERYWHERE. And i could never find information when i REALLY needed it (such as my example else-thread about the vitamins).

If you make a lot of To Do lists, something else you might want to look at is Remember The Milk: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ It's made it really REALLY easy for me to keep track of tasks across 5 different projects (plus non-project, at-home type of stuff like "spray mushrooms", "fertilize lemon tree"). I LOVE that i can create a To Do list for today, but tag things for each project and then easily switch over to a project's tab and see everything i need to do on that project for the next week -- like Friends of Dennis and Crabby Media and the cinema. RTM has a nice app (i'm on Android) -- it lets me add a widget to my home screen to see what i have to do for today, and it also pings the phone when i have a reminder set with a time.

Good call on the slide-out keyboard; I have that now & am unsure how comfortable I would be with a touch-screen keyboard. I'll make sure to test it, for sure.

Thanks for the Dropbox note! I might make a separate post about people's favorite apps, once I get the phone.

I have an Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy II-something-or-other -- it is about 1.5 years old at this point) & quite like it. I did some reading around & talked to a couple of phone store people (without buying anything from them afterwards, so at least it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing, heh) & I kind of feel like Android phones can pretty much do anything an iPhone can do but you get the Apple Prestige Tax w/an iPhone? Also as far as corporate creepiness/surveillance I feel like Apple & Google (who do Android) are about equal. I chose my phone partly b/c, for the price point I was willing to pay, the screen was bigger & quality slightly better than, say, an HTC phone (I don't know if HTC does phones over there). I thought I'd be really slow at typing on it w/an on-screen keyboard, but I am better at it than I thought (& also the rental phone I had in Japan was much worse in terms of typing on its on-screen keyboard, heh -- so yeah, I second/third/whatever the recommendation to go & play on the phones at the store).

I have used the Crunchyroll app on my phone. I also have a manga reading app that taps into scanlation sites. :D

I use the standard Twitter app but power users can rec you more! Also I've used Google Maps, & I second the rec for Evernote, & I haven't used Instagram but I'm sure there's an Android app for it.

I think they do have HTC phones here, I believe that's what

were_duck has.
I just tested a co-workers touch-screen keyboard on her iPhone, and it seemed fine to me.

I might hit you up for the manga reading app after I get a phone, bwahaha.

I second Wrdnrd's point about the QWERTY hardware keyboard. They will pry my hardware keyboard from my cold dead hands, and I will only switch to an iPhone if someone can convince me that there are cases with as functional a hardware keyboard as I've had on my smartphones. It was a really big deal to me, even though I wanted an iPhone desperately until Sprint finally got them because only then did I realize that I absolutely was not willing to give up having a physical keyboard.

I ended up with this phone because it had a physical keyboard and my mother liked it better than the iPhone. (My mom is on my cell plan. It's a whole complicated thing where I dragged her in to get a phone since she clearly wasn't going to do it on her own and hers was ancient so she never used it, and Sprint lets us both have local numbers and be on the same plan despite us living in entirely different time zones, which when the iPhone came out, no other carrier would do.) Since I'm tech support for my mom, and I liked the phone, I figured that having us have the same phone would make my tech support function easier. I already provide tech support for the TiVo I got her, and if she ever gets broadband, I'm sure I'll be doing tech support for that too. It's a thing, and a thing that's likely totally irrelevant to your choices.

But the keyboard was a deal breaker for me.

One other thing if that matters: an iPhone cannot (or could not as of last Christmas) be covered under Sprint's insurance agreement. If you get a Spring iPhone, you get subcontracted to Apple for AppleCare. (I'm a Mac user, so I'm plenty familiar with AppleCare, and I like Applecare, but since I have expensive phones, I do carry insurance on them often, and I believe Sprint's insurance covers things like cracking the screen by dropping but Apple's does not or limits how many times they'll replace that. On top of that, my experience with Sprint service anyway is that they don't have a lot of stores that can service their phones anyway. More than once, I've gone to the nearest Sprint store to get something covered fixed, and they send me driving all over creation to find a service center. With an iPhone, you may have to go to an Apple store to get your iPhone serviced. Someone who's owned a Sprint iPhone may be able to be more specific, but it's something I would ask about if that's something that you anticipate needing to deal with.)

On the other hand, while there are plenty of apps for the phone I have, the iPhones still have a much cooler interface, it seems like a much cooler set of apps (but maybe that's just because iPhone people are much more app focused?), and generally I still look longingly at other iPhones all the time. I think I did see a physical sliding keyboard case for the iPhone at thinkgeek.com, so once you figure out which of the issues are the biggest priority for you, you may be fine without the keyboard.

Edited 2012-07-13 07:08 (UTC)

This is all very good to know! I actually live on the same block as an Apple store that services iProducts, so I think they would help with iPhones & etc. I haven't actually been inside, so I don't know for sure, but I believe that's true!

I have a HTC which I love (I don't know if they are available in the US) and which runs Android. I've tried a couple of different twitter apps. The one that came with the phone was Peep, I think, and it worked fine, but I just got Tweetcaster because it will let me have multiple accounts and I want to get Mrs Corylon back up and running. I have found that if I am using apps on my phone during the day then it tends to need charging fairly frequently. I do have an app-killer app on it, but I don't actually use it that much.

I have never bothered putting music or ebooks on my phone because I have an iPod and an ereader, which I would rather use. I do use my phone to read fic, if I'm on the bus, though. And the screen has a good enough resolution for that.

Mine has a touchscreen keyboard, which I have no problems with - I am a bit of a ridiculously quick texter as, I am sure,

littlebutfierce would confirm! And I was a little worried that the touchscreen would slow me down, but once I got used to the predictive text interface I soon got back up to speed.

I have used googlemaps a lot on my phone, and it works fine. And thanks to this post I now know that Instagram have released an Android app, so I am clearly going to have to go and get that as soon as I remember to do it! (I will read this post, think "Oooh! have to do that!" and then forget for a week or three. It's just how I work!) It used to be iPhone only which was a blinking pain.

I have a Google phone - Samsung Nexus S - the Google "flagship" phones are available across carriers, and I think the newest is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I love my phone. I used to have an iPhone & I probably won't go back b/c I've been really happy with Android and the way that it's so well integrated into Google, which ... Google pretty much owns my life, so that makes everything easier. (I felt, too, that either I would have Apple running my life or Google, and Google seemed more user-friendly if not less evil corporately, so.. yeah.) I use my old iPhone as an iPod touch now, but Nick runs all his music through his phone & seems happy w/it.

I am (as you know) a heavy twitter user & I use Twicca -- which is not a very well known app, but which I like a lot better than some of the other more popular ones. Lots of folks use Plume on Android, and there are a few others, almost all free. I'd recommend just experimenting with them (regardless of whether you go iPhone or Android) and see what feels best to you.

I use Instagram on my Android; I've noticed no difference between that & the iPhone version.

I've found my Android to be much more customizable & flexible than my iPhone ever was, but that may've changed some in new iPhone iterations. (I had an iPhone 3G.) I saw you mention Siri on twitter, and while Android doesn't have a Siri, the voice controls/capabilities are quite good and are rapidly getting even better. With the new OS update that's coming out, there will be a thing called Google Now, which I'm kind of curious about and which seems to sort of be Android's answer to Siri, except maybe with less twee?

Whatever you decide, try to get your hands on operational models and poke around before buying.

It's like EVERY SINGLE PERSON who replied after me about their HTC phones and how they didn't know if they're available in the U.S. didn't even SEE my comment where i said Andy and i have HTC phones. o_____O Geez, i've long suspect i'm invisible, BUT NOW I KNOW. Guess that means more naked lounging for me! [strips]

PS: I have an HTC phone!

PPS: I LIVE IN THE U.S.!

(I need a "crushing sarcasm" icon.)

Edited (closed HTML tag is closed!) 2012-07-13 15:31 (UTC)

I SEE YOU, BB.

DON'T CALL ME "BB". (Trufax: I hate that shit.)

omg I'm sorry, ;_;

HAHAHAHAHAHA, my favorite icon. \o/ It's cool. I kinda keep my hatred of "BB" on the downlow since everyone in my fandom circle uses it all the time. But, as we were speaking yesterday of stuff on Twitter that makes us cringe?, THERE'S ONE OF MINE. My secret is out! :o

The one time I don't read everyone else's comments before making a comment! THE ONE TIME!

And

littlebutfierce, too!! The 2 people i count on for impeccable research, no less!! I am shocked, SHOCKED I SAY.

I blame being distracted by this e-mail I got that I don't want to read that is sat staring at me. *firm nod*

I also have found the iPhone interface to be really elegent, user-friendly, intuitive, and well-integrated in terms of apps. E.g., I can go on the internet, look up a number, and then call the number just by clicking on it. Or, if someone e-mails me with "let's go to the movies on Friday at 9!" I can click on "Friday at 9" and add it to my calendar, which syncs with my iCal on my computer. Ditto to the love of Dropbox and Evernote.

The new iPhones are really durable, too-- the screen material is super scratch resistant. I've found that a bumper has been completely sufficient, instead of a case (and I've dropped mine a couple of times on pavement). I was uncertain about the keyboard issue, too, but have ultimately liked not having one, because I think it makes the device more flexible-- you get more space (i.e., if you want to watch a movie, you get the full screen) and I found they screen keyboard to easier to use, ultimately, than the slide-out keyboard on my old phone (I have large hands, and it's nice to be able to turn the phone sideways and get a bigger keyboard).

My bet is that if you went with an iPhone, you'd want to ditch the iPod. It's nice not having too many devices to carry around.

re: iPods - unfortunately for me, probably not! My iPod is not synced with the music on my computer, mostly because I got the device before I upgraded my computer, and my then-6-year-old computer had very little space to hold music.

And I have a shit-ton of music I've ripped from library CDs, ^^;;

The iPhone does sound pretty convenient, and there are fewer options, so I might just end up going with it!

Aha. There is a workaround for pulling music off your ipod, in case you ever want to do that (if for no other reason than to not lose it all if your iPod dies). I can dig that up if that's helpful.

I got my iPhone 3GS two years ago (right when the 4 came out, because I was cheap), and although some apps are a bit slow now (esp. Google Maps), it's chugging along pretty well.

I use my Google Calendar and it syncs with the iPhone calendar so well I usually forget they're different. I also use Twittelator for Twitter, but I don't know if the Crunchyroll app works.

CB has the Galaxy II, and the giant screen is gorgeous. I, alas, find the Android interface incredibly unintuitive. CB says overall Android is much more customizable, but because it is, sometimes you have to fiddle with it a LOT more just to get to certain options that iPhone has as default (aka the Android calendar doesn't do little pop-up window notices when your appointment comes up so you have to check the calendar to see what's coming up? He also hates the music player).

I kind of figure that I am not a phone power user (I also just go on 200 MB/month which works for me), so I just want an easy experience with games and working things.

But yes. I would definitely go and try to play around with the two OSs... if you have friends with both, I'd go around and do things like listen to music, use maps, other things you will do really often, to see what you like best.

Here's what I'm using for those things on my iPhone:

* Twitterrific, paid app, I like it better than the official app
* I don't use Instagram, but there's iPhone and Android clients

Also, plan on Facebook killing Instagram soon since they bought them this spring. Facebook has a weakness, photo sharing. And if someone can build a better photo sharing service (like instagram) and Facebook can't pay to go away, hooray, Facebook dies like it should.

* iPhones currently use Google maps, however

Apple's replacing Google maps with their own implementation based off of Open Street Map in the next version of iOS. Apple has not said if that new implementation will include walking, mass transit, and bicycle directions. Of course there's always Google maps' mobile web version.

* iPhone has native notes app that syncs with iCloud, or you can use Evernote as other have mentioned

I have feelings around using the Cloud for storing things like notes. And I'm more comfortable with apps that sync with one's computer rather than someone else's service.

* iPhone avail for AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, pick your favorite Telco Oligarch
* iPhone does SMS and MMS, also supports 'iMessage' which is a SMS/MMS to email gateway

I like this because the messages app is smart about switching between iMessage and SMS/MMS so Cynthia and I can text each other all day without hitting our 200 SMS/MMS a month limit.

* Crunchyroll has an app for iPhone, I've used the app on iPad. It is okay.

Regarding batteries:

The contract on my iPhone has run out long before I've needed a battery replacement. Also battery replacement can be done at any full-sized Apple Store. I don't consider it a deal breaker.

Also, in terms of skeeviness, I find Apple less skeevy than Google. Apple makes money by selling you hardware. Google makes money by selling you.

iOS doesn't support Flash. This is a good thing, considering that Flash (via ad networks) is a major attack vector.

Unfortunately, I don't know if there are any mobile browsers on any mobile platform that will allow you to install extensions like you can on laptop/desktop, so you can't run Ad Block, prevent Facebook from tracking you, etc. I would imagine the Carriers would throw a Baby Hayek Christ fit if you could block ads.

PHONES

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject