Background: I had a DroidX for 2+ years. Smashed the screen accidentally at the USC-Hawaii game 3 weeks back. Held out on replacing until the iPhone 5 came out. Pre-ordered and received a black 64GB Verizon iPhone 5 9/21. Today, 9/28 I went back to Android, via the Galaxy S3.
Before I get to why I went back to Droid, and specifically the Galaxy S3, here's What I liked better about the iPhone 5:
1. App Experience - The app ecosystem is richer. It's much easier to find out what are the good iPhone apps out there because there are many articles and rankings on the subject. And the apps don't vampire your battery, which is a specific problem I have on the Droid side. With Droid phones, you occasionally get an app that sucks the life out of your battery even when you're not using the phone. Good luck figuring out which one it is. My only solution has been to delete apps one by one until the problem is solved. I'm open to better solutions on this, it's something Google really needs to solve.
2. Facetime over LTE. I have a 1 year old daughter, a non-techie wife, and I travel a decent amount for work. Being able to facetime home from the road without having to get my iPad or Mac on wifi from the hotel room was big. It's actually one of the main reasons I went iPhone in the first place. I know, I can achieve the same thing via other apps like Skype, but then I have to teach my wife Skype and probably talk her through using it the first few times vs. her just hitting a "Facetime" button from her contacts list.
3. Notifications & Updates - out of control on Droid (every app wants to give you notifications on everything, and update itself once/week). Much better controlled in iPhone. You can edit these things in Droid, but it takes some effort to figure out how.
4. Podcasts - Seems like there are some apps to do this on the Droid, but I haven't figured it out yet and the good ones cost money. The iPhone does a fantastic job of building this in with an extensive library/selection tied to iTunes. Makes it much easier for me to keep track of Brock & Salk in the Morning.
That being said, there were a number of things, most of them little things especially around the UI, that added up to me going back Droid. If I had to put it into 1 really big thing it's UI. I know iPhone has a rep for being the best UI on the market. But having used both IMHO there's no way that's true. Here are the specifics of What I liked better about the Galaxy S3:
1. Swype - if you haven't used it, you can't appreciate how much more convenient it is to write texts and emails by dragging your finger between letters on the screen rather than typing. After 3 days of trying to type and often mis-typing, I couldn't take it anymore. The iPhone has some apps for this but none are rated well.
2. Automatic Contact Integration - without me doing anything, the phone correlates my contacts from Outlook (work), gmail, facebook, etc. So when I go to a contact, I see their FB picture, work phone number, personal cell, work and personal email (if I have it), etc. Not sure if the iPhone could do this, it didn't do it automagically.
3. Missed Call Contacts - in Droid, when I look at my missed calls, it's 1 button to send them a text. iPhone requires you to select their contact details, scroll down, then you can send a text. And most of the time I tried to do that I ended up dialing the number by accident, since the arrow you select to get to contact details is fairly small. In the grand scheme of things it's 1 extra click and scroll, not a huge deal. But not as slick and kind of annoying when you're used to hitting a button to have to hit multiple buttons, and more than 50% of the time dialing by accident. I did go to an Apple store and bring this up hoping it was configurable, but the guy just said "That's how it is".
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| Iphone missed calls screen 1 |
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| Galaxy Missed Call |
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| Iphone missed call screen 2 (still need to scroll down to send text) |
4. In-call Screen Menu - this is another minor irritation at inferior elegance. When I'm on a call on the iPhone and I look at the phone, it gives me a menu to select keypad, mute, speaker, etc. On the Droid, it presents me with the keypad alongside a mute, speaker, and headset button. The difference is if I'm on a Conference call and I have to enter in a code or bridge number for the conference and I want to go on and off mute, on and off speaker, iPhone requires me to jump around menus, vs. Droid lets me do it all from one place. I'm on concalls a lot, so this matters to me. If you're not, you can disregard this one. This was another "That's just how it is".
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| iPhone in call menu |
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| Galaxy in call menu |
5. Google Maps. I'm starting to like Waze more and more, and if I was still on iPhone it would be my default. But I only need that when I know I'm heading into possible traffic. Google Maps built in is nice.
6. Bigger Screen. 4.8" is 20% bigger than 4". That new iPhone commercial is cute, where they try to say the iPhone is the perfect size for your hand, but who are they kidding. If you think size doesn't matter, then you'll believe anything she says and she's probably cheating on you.
7. Battery Life - My 2 year old DroidX was still good for 24-48 hours unless I did a lot of web browsing. The iPhone seemed to be more like 15-30 hours and that was week 1.
8. Dialing from Gmail - On the iPhone, I couldn't press a phone number on an email in the Gmail app. The Apple store guy told me I had to use Apple's email client to dial numbers from gmail. Problem with that is the gmail app has much better functionality in terms of being able to sort "important" messages and use the rest of the gmail tools. This limitation may be Google's fault, not Apple's, but it still limited my iPhone experience.
9. I can use all my old cables, chargers, etc.
Overall they're both nice phones. I think the iPhone 5 is a great phone if you want simplicity and will sacrifice performance, and the Galaxy is a great phone if you want performance and are willing to deal with a little complexity. Android smokes iOS on UI design & intuitiveness and Apple wins on App ecosystem and App stability.
Hope that helps
PS - these iPhone shots are from my wife's iPhone 4s, not my iPhone 5 since I already got rid of it. But there's no difference.
