I think Android outselling the iPhone (and eventually overtaking it in raw numbers) will soon become pretty obvious. Android is a pretty mass-market product - its flexibility means that manufacturers can put a wide array of products and users can make those products their own.
I really don't think a single product (especially a tightly-defined one like the iPhone) can meet even a majority of people's needs.
And I think this is why Adobe's anti-trust activity against Apple won't go very far.
Apple is very comfortable taking part of the market, owning it, doing things their way, and making boatloads of money. They are not trying to be everything to everyone.
Disclosure: I just switched from iPhone to a Google N1 because I was tired of the box Apple put me in.
@symesc: I just switched from an iPhone to a N1 for the same reason. An inferior phone for a dozen reasons- but a switch I plan to stick with, for now.
My hopes and expectations for Android on the N1 were about here (holds hand 12 inches off of desk).
After two days with it I honestly had a headache. It just didn't work the way I thought it would, after having spent the better part of 3 years on iPod Touch and iPhone. Maybe the headache was my brain creating new neural pathways? Regardless, my opinion was here (hand 6 inches off of desk).
This was my trough of disillusionment. I even cheated. I turned on my now-SIM-less iPhone and checked my twitter feed. I felt dirty. Used.
Then something clicked. First I was finding things I could do with Android that I couldn't do with iPhone. Things like downloading 20mb+ podcasts without connecting to my Mac. Things like finding apps like AppBrain that create meaningful recommendations for me. Things like putting widgets on the screen instead of just icons. And the ease of multitasking? Sigh. My impression of this platform is now here (hand 24 inches above desk).
This is not to say there aren't issues. My battery life is terrible and I'm actively experimenting with ways to change this. Overall the Android platform is "scruffier" than iPhone, and by that I mean moving from one app to the next can be jarring from a usability perspective.
But that's part of what I like about Android. If the iPhone is like the suburbs, rows and rows of consistent housing and 2.2 children, Android is like living downtown where the action is. Sure it's dangerous. And now I wouldn't want to have my wife and kids down there after hours. They have iPhones and iPods. Safer that way.
But I'm not going back the burbs. In fact, I gave my iPhone away to a buddy who had his stolen. I don't miss it.
If Apple delivers something equally as compelling to my inner geek, great, I'll get one. Until then, I have never been happier with my phone.
I'd only used an iPhone for 6 months, but the experience was positive enough that I'm still in the headache phase with the N1. Largely over hardware problems that will likely never be solved until a later revision: battery life, AMOLED screen being unreadable in direct sunlight, the camera can take 1-4 seconds before snapping a photo, dust under the screen, low-end multitouch sensor, and flaky touch sensing (often thinks I'm pressing an inch down). I feel sort of ripped off when I think of some of those aspects.
Don't get me wrong, there things I prefer, even over a jailbroken iPhone- especially the notifications system. That's genius, IMHO.
My trough is the Facebook app- I went from making a few photo posts a day, mostly of my kid, to one or two over the last two weeks. Never bothered to update Feacebook until I got an iPhone- it's rough enough on Android that I've stopped.
N1 software still isn't quite as good as iPhone. But here are 4 reasons I prefer my N1:
1. the navigation app is better than what you can get on iPhone (use it almost every day)
2. Native Google Voice App
3. 5 megapixel camera phone (for me this was the threshold where I never carry a separate digital camera anymore, 5MP is enough for facebook)
4. I can use t-mobile instead of AT&T
Given the software isn't quite as good, these 4 features make it about a tie with the iPhone in my opinion. The fact Apple is irritating me lately makes the N1 a win.
I'm a proud father of a two year old the long lag of the N1's camera makes it near worthless. Doesn't matter if it's 5 or 10MP as long as it takes over a second to snap a photo.
I was impressed by the iPhone's camera, but that's only because I was coming from an HTC Mogul, which had a horrible 2MP camera.
That I can (mostly) do what I want with my N1 without relying on a jailbreak is what makes the N1 a win, overwhelmingly. That said, it is ironic and frustrating that your warranty is voided when you unlock your bootloader, a part of rooting a N1. It doesn't matter if there is dust under the screen, they see the "unlocked" icon and turn down warranty requests.
At least, they were- I'd love to hear that things have changed... Unless that changes I won't be rooting my N1, and I'm glad I didn't do that first thing- I just had to send my two week old N1 in for a swap to HTC because of dust under the screen. :/
The lag your experience with the camera is mostly likely do to the autofocus/exposure whatever stuff. When I first got my N1, I would "click" the onscreen shutter "button" quickly like it was a hyperlink or something. Instead, you need to hold the onscreen shutter "button" down until you hear a tone and get a yellowish outline around the picture preview area. Then let go of the "button" and the picture will take instantly.
I heard the same thing from several other people about the N1. I ended up buying it anyway - I really needed a smartphone, and I'd never been quite willing to go for the iPhone, mainly because of what my friends told me about their monthly bills (I like to prepay on a fixed-rate plan and not have to think about it).
So I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy everything was, apparently because it was all new for me. battery life was the only thing that upset me at first, but after juggling setting a bit I'm happy with that. Haven't had a problem with the other things, other than the flaky touch sensing - I'm pretty sure this is a software problem, because when I run into it (once ever 2-3 days) I've gotten into the habit of sleeping and waking the phone with the top button, which seems to fix it.
The poster above is right about it being a little 'scruffy' in terms of not having a completely smooth user experience...but like him, I'm OK with that because I like having a pocket computer rather than an appliance. It reminds me of the home computer v. game console debate in the 80s, actually, with Android as in the role of MSX.
I can't speak on behalf of the grandparent poster but my gripes are not at all with the N1 hardware itself -- in fact the N1 is quite possibly the best put together phone I've owned. My issues are with Android and how it still feels rough around the edges.
1) Lack of an integrated mail tool. I really don't care so much about POP/IMAP folder integration but why do I need two email apps, one for Gmail and one for IMAP. The stock IMAP client sucks for that matter and I've had a lot better luck with Jesse Vincent's K9Mail fork off the core mail app.
2) The pull down notification bar seems clunky. On one hand it's nice to see at a glance all the things that happened on my phone while I wasn't using it. However when "you have unread mail" or "missed call" is mixed in with "XYZ song is playing" it gets sort of muddled.
3) Deleting an app is quite possibly the most unintuitive thing on the whole phone. If you're used to just hitting an "X" on the home screen from the iPhone you're in for a disappointment.
None of these are dealbreakers for me and in general I am still very satisfied with my N1. However it seems to me that Android is still very much a platform for hackers. For example, Android has a running process list with an option to kill tasks on the phone. Not so on the iPhone, because the OS developers clearly decided their users shouldn't even have to think about this.
My N1 arrives tomorrow so I have no first-hand experience, but I assume you can access gmail through IMAP on the phone like you can on any other mail client if you don't want to use the Gmail app?
>For example, Android has a running process list with an option to kill tasks on the phone.
Android does not have this. There are third party applications that do task management, however the word "placebo" applies to most advocates of them, and user task management should never be necessary. If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them, and this is a cardinal foundation of the platform.
The new iPhone multitasking system works in a very similar manner to how Android has always worked, it should be mentioned.
>Lack of an integrated mail tool. I really don't care so much about POP/IMAP folder integration but why do I need two email apps, one for Gmail and one for IMAP.
Because the gmail app has different features and functions?
> Deleting an app is quite possibly the most unintuitive thing on the whole phone.
Now this is just weird. The most obviously way to uninstall an app is to simply go into downloads (where you installed it) and pick uninstall. The second to go into applications in settings and uninstall.
Your gripes are seemingly that you've been mentally debilitated by using the iPhone, and now you use everything relative to how the iPhone works.
If I go to "Applications > Settings > Running Services" on a stock 2.1 Android phone I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names. Tapping one of them terminates the task. It's not "top" but it's still pretty close to a process manager.
A user shouldn't have to care that "com.google.process.gapps" is running "MailSyncAdapterService."
>Because the gmail app has different features and functions?
OK, that's fair, so merge them into one app and have it display gmail accounts in an enhanced manner. It simply seems counterintuitive to have two applications for the task of reading email.
>I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names
That gives you get a list of running services. Further, in no way is a user ever directed to go there for any reason. You have no reason to ever go into that screen.
The reason I have is killing tasks like Camera, which appear to chew away at the battery even as they sit in the background... It wasn't until I started using a task manager that I started getting decent battery life out of my N1.
The first week, I followed the party line- I didn't touch a task manager. And the first week I was seeing 20% of my battery drained by 10 AM in the morning while using it for under 15 minutes since I pulled it off the charger.
The placebo effect is remarkably powerful, so I know I'm not going to convince you. However let me say that I took my phone off the charger at 8:30am, and right now my battery is at around 95%.
I never manage processes or services. I use apps and leave them and allow Android to manage the lifecycle.
Sure I do. I use it to kill the exchange email sync, because it triples battery usage even when I have it set to not sync (I believe this has something to do with the fact that it's just scraping Outlook Web Access, not actually connecting with Exchange, which is impossible outside of the firewall.)
And I use it for this sort of thing frequently. Most services pull down battery life considerably.
With these services up, my Droid loses maybe 40% of its battery life in a day (with minimal usage.)
While I sleep, it rarely consumes more than 10%. The counterexamples have been when I've left the Pandora Service running, as well as the Email Sync service.
So, I test it by enabling the service, changing nothing else about my usage, and watching my battery life take a nosedive.
And on the subject of what exactly it's doing, that's roughly the explanation I got from my friends on the Windows side. We have Exchange disabled outside the firewall, so my phone has to hit up OWA to get the data. Is Exchange Web Services an API available from OWA, but separate from the HTML? It's my understanding that my phone is in fact scraping the HTML.
There's 4 different interfaces that use the same OWA URL but function completely differently. There's the web based email that people typically think of when someone says "OWA". There's WebDAV, which uses HTTP or form based authentication (to pick up the proper cookies) and then uses special URLs and WebDAV HTTP verbs to perform actions relative to retrieving/sending mail, listings, calendar, etc (this is in the process of being deprecated I believe). There's Web Services, which is (if I remember correctly) a SOAP API that provides the same functionality as WebDAV (and some additional functionality) which has become the preferred method as of Exchange 2007. There's ActiveSync, which uses WBXML formatted message passing (it's more complicated, but more robust than WebDAV and Web Services). If you're using k9mail to talk to an Exchange server, it uses WebDAV. If you're using the "Work Email" app, it will use ActiveSync, Web Services and WebDAV, depending on which is enabled. If you're using TouchDown, it will use whichever of the three you select.
Frequently in configurations, WebDAV access, Web Services access and ActiveSync are all enabled when OWA is enabled for the Exchange server. It is only in rare conditions when you will see OWA enabled and not one of the three.
> If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them
Has the OS been fixed such that it monitors CPU and network radio usage by background processes? Task killing isn't done to reclaim the RAM (which, as you note, the OS handles itself), it's to ensure that poorly-written programs don't waste your battery without your control or knowledge.
iPhoneOS 4.0 gets around this by only allowing apps in the background to use a tightly defined set of APIs, the actual processing code of which is written entirely by Apple, so they have full control over their effect on battery life.
@ergo98: Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!
(replying here because I can't reply to your comment directly)
The N1 has flaws, but many of your complaints are hilariously wrong. The fact that you give pronouncements on multitasking borders on comical, as you have no understanding about how Android's multitasking works.
Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!
I understand how Android's multitasking is supposed to work, but in my experience it isn't up to snuff. From your tone, I imagine you'd ask me to put up with a sluggish phone rather than doing something to deal with it. Maybe it'll get better in 2.2.
@ergo98: The 3GS is indeed crippled, but an objective user would be hard pressed to call it inferior. In the end, to each their own- some folks (including myself) are willing to put up with the limitations of the N1, and some folks are willing to put up with the limitations of an unjailbroken iPhone.
>some folks (including myself) are willing to put up with the limitations of the N1
Which limitations would those be?
>but an objective user would be hard pressed to call it inferior
It is absolutely inferior in at least a dozen ways. It is superior in a variety of other ways (polish), however I am simply using the same phrasing that you used relative to the N1.
heh, thanks for the heads up! A habit from other threaded boards, even though the syntax is twitter. Some folks still manage to get confused about who is speaking to whom- but point taken, this isn't slashdot. :)
I really don't think a single product (especially a tightly-defined one like the iPhone) can meet even a majority of people's needs.