daras

My fellow iPhone users

I had quite an exciting weekend as I got an Android phone (Samsung Captivate). I was pretty excited about how Android OS is more customizable and robust. In the last 2-3 weeks I had looked at Droid X (Verizon), Droid Incredible (Verizon) and most recently Samsung Captivate (AT&T). There is no doubt that Verizon network is much better than AT&T but both state of the art Android phones that Verizon launched are non-global (reviews on internet will not tell you that!)

Let me begin with the Android – what’s the big deal about it? It is cool! Really cool in what you can do with widgets, home screens, 2-3 different types of keyboards, multi-tasking, free GPS with voice based navigation and all other tools that Google provides. I enjoyed playing with the phone and did not realize its been several hours already (my wife cannot see this review!). So I got past the basics and moved on to more sophisticated things – email, outlook synchronization, address books, music and apps. This is where things started to get tricky – no easy way to sync Outlook because of which my contacts did not get copied over easily. Email integration is pretty good but by default all your google addresses show up in contacts and takes quite a while to figure out how to remove them. Apps – there are plenty, however separate apps to do different things. It’s not like iTunes which does most of what iPhone requires you to do. So if you were to synchronize your phone on a weekly basis, you would need a cheat sheet of number of things to do or steps to follow. As a techie I would love to do that but as a user I don’t have time.

Now someone might say that this is expected with Android. But here is what Apple has done – Apple has oversimplified things keeping their end user in mind. Things like cut-copy-paste – if you were to do it in Android, you would say – what was Google thinking? Things like customized ring tones, changing settings, switching between apps and many more. This actually comes from the remarkable difference between the two companies – Apple traditionally has been creative and innovative while Google is a group of mathematical geniuses!

If I would have spent more time with Android, I would have loved it for sure, but the point to test was that can someone get Andriod savvy as
quickly as an iPhone? Can an average Joe enjoy a smartphone while the business community is using the high end functionalities? And for someone like me can I save time and yet carry my office and personal things in one equipment wherever I go around the globe?

I am ordering the iPhone4.

@saxenaas

PS: To all Android users – It is a great phone and I am sure you love it but it will take a lot of time for Google to create the magic Apple did.