Goodbye iPhone, Hello HTC Desire S
So it’s nearly two years since I got my iPhone 3GS, and I decided I wanted to change. Not because the old 3GS was feeling slow – it still felt snappy and the battery lasted two days. What made me change was those ever-so-annoying “if you don’t have an iPhone” adverts. The thought of being associated with a brand that came across as self-obsessed and narcissistic had slowly been eating away at me, and when I read this story, my decision was made.
Compared to iOS, Android has a very “home-brewed” feel to it. The interface is much more complex and far less intuitive. On the flip side, however, that means everything is a lot more configurable. In this respect, Android reminds me more of Windows Mobile and Symbian than it does of iOS. I can schedule my work email to only push new items during work hours, for example – something I missed from my Nokia, which the iPhone did not offer. The home screen is far superior to that of the iPhone, but it falls down on simple things. Renaming a folder was surprisingly difficult to work out; it turned out I needed to click and hold on the folder name in the folder’s pop-up. Dragging widgets is awkward, as you can’t seem to have more than one floating at once, so rearranging them when the screen is full is impossible.
Unlocked Doors
While the software does have a “rough and ready” feel to it, this has benefits, as there is virtually no vendor lock-in. I managed to stream music from my DLNA NAS box quite easily. Apple will let you do this, but only within their ecosystem. There is free satnav (although the phone doesn’t come with a car kit), voice input, and a whole host of good-quality apps available from the app store. One really useful feature is HTC Sense Online, which lets you locate your phone, make it ring, and lock it remotely – great when you think you may have lost it.
Battery Life
I am disappointed with the battery life. My iPhone (when new) would be at about 70% at 5:30 pm when I left work, with average use. The Desire S was at about 40%. It is doing a lot more, however, and just proves how little battery technology has improved in the last few years.
Having used the phone for over a month now (nearly two), I have a good idea of what I think of it and how it compares to the iPhone.
User Experience
The user experience is nowhere near as good as the iPhone. A good example of this is when I enter the contacts app and press the Search key. The search field does not automatically get focus, so I have to tap at the top of the screen (having just pressed the search key at the bottom), and then move back down again to begin typing. It feels awkward and unpolished.
Then there are the bundled apps. Like a new laptop, the phone came bundled with lots of OEM crapware. It seems HTC want me to use their Twitter client, and there’s no way to delete it (or even remove the icon). What is it with hardware manufacturers trying to be software companies? Just like those pointless Wi-Fi utilities or launcher bars that the likes of Acer and HP used to bundle with their laptops (HP even made their own Media Centre – the Me Too Edition).
Anyway, it’s a small annoyance, but the abundance of icons is likely to confuse many people.
Battery Life
The battery life is abysmal. It will last a day if you don’t use it much, but if you use it frequently, you’ll need to carry a charger with you. The iPhone wasn’t great, but its battery would always last a day and still have plenty left over.
On the other hand, this is the price you pay for carrying a much more powerful device in your pocket, one that can actually multitask. (The iPhone currently just pretends to, except for a few limited tasks.) Once you get used to that, I think it would be hard to go back to a single-tasking system. Being able to have the phone download new podcasts automatically every night and update Google Reader on schedule is a breath of fresh air for anyone who used to do that five years ago on their Symbian or PocketPC-based phone – and then, like me, switched to the iPhone when it became the big thing.
There are numerous ways to improve battery life. The best is to turn off background data, which rather defeats the purpose of having such a phone, but it’s nice to know you could, in theory, get a couple of days out of it if needed. Great if you ever go camping at a festival (although the camera also drains the battery quite a lot).
Missing iOS?
For all its UX faults, I prefer Android. Want Wi-Fi music sync? There’s an app for that. Free satnav? There’s an app for that. Tethering over Wi-Fi? There’s an app for that. Want to download the latest albums? Guess what, you can do that too.
In fact, there’s an app for almost everything available on the iPhone, and the Android version is usually less restricted and cheaper. The exception here is games, but I’ve still found a number of quality gems – just fewer of the big names.
So I can’t say I miss iOS much, except for the eye candy. Maybe iOS 5 will sway me next time.
A highly recommended phone!