“Awhile (2 months ago) back I bought an Android phone,” Alex Arena blogs. “The decision was made for two reasons: I wanted to have a first person point-of-view when I wrote about Android, and, I really wanted a phone with a keyboard. I settled on the Sony Xperia Pro, with the knowledge that if I didn’t like it, I’d only have to wait a few months for the new iPhone.”
Arena writes, “So far the experience has been terrible; I’ll be in line, come September.”
“On the rare occasion that I can use an app without it freezing up or crashing, it’s only to be greeted by an experience and UI that’s subpar. I swear: there’s not a single good Twitter client on this god-forsaken platform,” Arena writes. “I could excuse the shitty experience by reasoning that it’s only because the phone has older hardware, but let’s be honest; it’s specs are on par with the iPhone 4 with an experience that isn’t even in the same league, to put it lightly.”
Arena writes, “Android’s terrible user experience is the result of an equally with a terrible development experience. It’s just easier to make great things on iOS. Google needs to pull a Microsoft, and scrap the entire platform.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
ha ha
i have a droid phone i have to carry for work. my iphone 4s and my droid both have the official twitter client on them. the droid version has a bug where lists that i deleted months ago still appear in the client
Who gets a “Sony” phone? Geez. He could have at least gotten a Galaxy.
From the full article:
“What does it say about the design of your mobile OS, if it requires a quad-core device to even compete with the fluidity of a single-core iPhone? “
Exactly Googles slapped together mobile OS is only fluid when you throw it stupid amounts of horsepower for a mobile device. This in part to compensate for a disastrously flawed multi tasking model for mobile devices: copy the method used in PCs.
In this respect, Apple’s lead will probably widen as they develop their own chips and iOS in tandem to complement each other. This leads to much greater CPU efficiency that Android won’t ever be able to match, unless that is the path Google plans to take with Motorola. If so, Google’s “partners”, will really be getting shafted
Ah, good job, you have exposed
the brilliance envision years ago.
Apple controls the design, the chips, the software.
What lead? Android holds over 60% of global smartphone market share.
Only if you count China which uses their own version of Android that isn’t compatible with any other version and doesn’t even run Android apps.
Market share on unit number or profits? My portfolio will take the profit leader each time. Where do Android makers fall in line now? Apple’s iPhone is now worth more than *all* of Microsoft. That, there, is market share.
Android. Indefensible irrelevance.
I have now un-bricked one Android phone, and installed CM7 and CM9 on an additional two. This has renewed the appreciation for my factory unlocked iPhone.
brick it and mortar that droid down; don’t free it
Sony is in trouble in mobile phones; I wonder how many revisions of Android behind his phone was (original article doesn’t say). Could even be Eclair (2.2) or Froyo (2.3), when the latest Galazy is Ice Cream (4.0)
Fragmentation bites again!
Android ICS
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/sony-xperia-pro-gets-android-4-0-ice-cream-sandwich-update-01-06-2012/
not a beautiful device is it BLN?
and and update?
should be available for certain serial numbers
of the handset now.
Why bother – BRICK IT or TOSS IT.
Total crap if you ask me. Tossing an Android fanboy a bone while he waits for the iPhone 5 to drop so he can switch allegiances.
For reasons of necessity, not my first choice, I have a current model Android phone. It is rooted and running cm10 jellybean, the latest is, not really available to normal droid users. Aside from miserable battery life, it is usable, bordering on good.
Totally happy with an HTC Droid Inc running c7 modded firmware.
Android is inconsistent across phones but I happen to love this one. Works a treat.
“bordering on good” isn’t going to survive against “insanely great”.
You can already see the desertion from Android starting, with major OEMs lining up to use MSFT’s Win 8 for tablets.
I find myself a bit conflicted regarding Android. I am as loyal an Apple user as you will find and have been for many, many years. While I despise the way Schmidt stole so much from iOS, I do see the benefits of an open source OS. When I see projects like Ouya, I don’t know if I should support it or shun it like I have every other Android based device before it. I can only hope that another open source OS emerges and supplants Android…
Oh help, please do shun it.
The average consumer doesn’t need a phone running open source. Death to AndybotOs.
Google needs to pull a Microsoft, and scrap the entire platform. — I’m still in major guffawage over that one!
“Android’s terrible user experience is the result of an equally with a terrible development experience.”
I’m glad someone is pointing this out; Android development is terrible.
Actually its really easy and great.
You just need to program your app for three different versions and test it on about 150 devices before receiving emails from your customers that your program dosent work on the device they bought.
Rinse and repeat.
This is EASY for any good developer 😉
super great post – the truth hurts doesn’t it AndyBotOs.
I’ve been using bottom-of-the-barrel Android device for over a year now (Virgin mobile has by far the cheapest plans, and only got the iPhone a few weeks ago). My $130 LG Optimus V duplicates the experience of this blogger. Obviously, the performance of it will suck to high heavens, considering the anemic hardware. But even if we account for this, everything else is simply just bad. From the way one must seek out process and memory management utilities in order to enable the battery to survive a single day, to the way one must seek out utilities that enable moving installed apps from the rather limited internal storage to the external micro-SD card. Let’s not talk about the fact that the whole business of SD cards is totally unintuitive: before you pull it out, you must go into settings and unmount it. This is essentially completely incomprehensible to anyone but a small fringe group of us, tech types.
The biggest Android fans are the geeky tech people. They don’t have a problem with unintuitive GUI (most of them are used to it, dealing with Windows every day). But even among those, vast majority without any personal stake one way or the other will agree that the Android experience falls far behind the iOS experience.
Perfect post.
AndyBotOs, is not for the masses but for the geeks of the past. Geeks of the past, need the comfort to tinker their fingers in crap, so just scratch and smell droids-boys.
Let us not forget one more thing; with the exception of very few high-end devices that actually run ICS (Icecream sandwich, Android 4.0), or JB (Jellybean, 4.1), vast majority of them out there are still on GB or FY (Gingerbread, 2.3; or Froyo, 2.2)…!! Mine is on Froyo and for the past year, I have been thinking of doing what majority of those geeky owners do: spend 15+ man-hours researching the options, procedure, issues and wor-arounds of installing a cooked, customized Android ROM. For those not in the Android world, this ain’t no jailbreaking. This involves numberous steps, the procedure is fairly cumbersome, delicate and, if you are inexperienced, risky (could permanently brick your phone if you miss a single step), not to mention time-consuming. Ultimately, after investing some 15 hours into researching this thing and eventually doing it, my phone would be able to squeeze maximum possible from its hardware, I’d be able to get rid of carrier’s crapware, and I’d finally get features that the OS itself has long had, but that the carrier disallowed on stock ROMs. The reason I didn’t do this over the past 15 months? 15 hours of my time are worth roughly $1,5k (if I were to get paid during this time). I simply couldn’t justify wasting over $1k of my productive time in order to improve a bit on a $130 device. Now that the iPhone is available on VM, I can finally get what I wanted without wasting hours of my precious time. I’d rather spend them with my kids then with an Android phone (and a Windows PC; those custom ROMs cannot be installed from a Mac OS…).
It depends on your phone, when I rooted my HTC Droid Inc. it was very easy – some guy wrote a program that does the whole job. All I had to do was enable USB debugging and install the driver for it in windows.
Some of them are a major undertaking I agree.
Oy.
Seeing the love for this kind of article makes me a little ill.
First, a little disclosure. I’m very universal in my tech love. In my house we don’t go brand first, but rather buy the best tools for each job. The stationary home computer is a late model iMac running Lion (soon to be replaced when the new Windows 8 touchscreen desktops from Asus drop). My wife uses a MacBook Pro, I (and the staff I’m responsible for) all use Asus Zenbooks running (as of yesterday) Windows 8 RTM. I’ve owned three models of iPhone, two models of iPad, countless iPods and about a dozen Android phones and Tablets.
I tell you this so that you understand that I’ve made a thorough assessment of the computing landscape.
Android, on the right hardware, is better than iOS. Full stop.
Like iOS, Android has gone through significant overhauls of it’s UI and, like iOS has improved considerably over time. I would argue that, head to head, iOS 5 to ICS (or Jelly Bean which I’m currently running on one device, soon to be two) Android currently offers a better user experience than iOS.
But that’s subjective. What does “better” mean?
In this case, for me, it comes down to two factors. Flexibility for the user and app integration within the OS, specifically sharing capabilities.
iOS works one way, out of the box. And, to be fair, Apple’s suggested user experience (sans jailbreak) is very good. It’s simple, intuitive, and usable for productivity. But it’s incredibly boring and homogenized.
Android, by comparison, is fully customizable. I can change every element of how the UI behaves to my taste. Hell, I can make my Android home screen look and feel like my iMac home screen with the right tweaks. The end result is that I get a machine that feels like it’s mine, not Apple’s.
On the app integration side, nothing is more frustrating after using my Nexus 7 than picking up a friend’s iPad and realizing how crippled multi-tasking and sharing functionality in iOS is by comparison. I can share links, images, media etc. from any app, to any compatible app or service with the touch of one button. iOS, by contrast, requires (with the exception of native email, native browser, and stock Twitter and Facebook) exiting one app, moving the content into another and then sharing. Miserable.
As far as the claims of app performance on Android made in this article, they’re frankly absurd. I’ve used, and continue to use, both platforms. There’s no discernible difference in quality of appearance of performance on major apps between the two. Where iOS does excel and Android clearly needs some work is in app discovery. It still sucks on Android and shines on iOS.
The single biggest issue facing Android is fragmentation, which goes a long way to shaping the end user experience. Depending on which piece of hardware you pick up, the Android experience varies wildly, much like the similar scenario of OSX vs Windows.
The Nexus line is almost always fantastic (my Nexus 7 is my all time favorite tablet thus far), Samsung’s Galaxy line has been fairly reliable, as have been most of HTCs handsets (though their tablet attempt was dismal). Outside of that sphere though you get a really mixed bag. But then, we’ve known that for years. Every tech reviewer on the planet will tell you the same. What that means for the user is that they have to do a bit of research before purchasing a device; research that isn’t necessary in a one manufacturer ecosphere like Apple’s.
But having to research before making a choice doesn’t make the platform inferior, it just makes the people who elect not to and wind up with crappy gear as a result dumb.
If I were Apple and Google, I’d worry less about each other and more about the Windows 8 platform and what it’s going to do to the mobile market. After using each release of Windows 8 thus far, I can tell you that my next round of tech purchases are all going to be built around this platform. Surface Pro, whichever Lumia phone comes out of the gate and an Asus desktop. While iOS and Android have been bickering over mobile and trying to drag the mobile OS into the productivity sphere, Microsoft has (shockingly) built a solution that runs the other way and does so beautifully.
2013 is going to be an interesting year.
I’m very universal in my tech love. In my house we don’t go brand first, but rather buy the best tools for each job.
Same here. Therefore, my house full of Apple gear.
2013 is going to be an interesting year.
Let’s hope so. 2012 was supposed to be the year worthy competition with iOS devices appeared. Still waiting…
So you missed the part where Android trounced iOS in functionality and market share? I don’t know what other metrics one could use to decide a competition…
😀
What metrics have Android trouncing iOS in functionality? None. Therefore, you posted this lie because WHY?
Try reading the source article before making a fool of yourself.
As for market share: Cheap sells! But you get what you pay for. That’s very old news. Cockroaches outnumber humans! So your point is WHAT? Enjoy your cockroach. 😯
Also very old news: Suckers weep! And we’re seen plenty of that from Android victims. But please stick to your Android devices! I hope you use Windows as well! Just keep in mind that: YOU are responsible for your own BAD CHOICES, not anyone else. Don’t come back here sobbing and drooling. 😥
Oh and, how much do paid trolls get these days? Who hired you? Samsung, Sony or Google?
Ah, of course I must be a troll because I have a dissenting opinion. It couldn’t possibly be that your opinion is wrong. Which it is, objectively so.
What opinion? I pointed out that you are posting statements that are NOT based in fact, aka lies. So much for your objectivity. Nice try, propagandist.
So how much DO you get paid to post this BS?
I believe I backed up my views on Android being more functional in my original comment. I assume that the reason you didn’t notice that is an acute allergy to facts, always so inconvenient to the diehards.
Still waiting for your references…
Oh, you have none?
Again, I’ll ask, since you’re being intentionally vague and a bit disingenuous by not defining this metric you claim to call market share. You obviously mean units sold. Who cares. Sell a million widgets a year at a buck each. I’ll keep selling 100,000 at $100 each. The “market” you keep referring to about cares about nothing but profit. And on that count, no one even comes close to Apple re: smart phone profits.
So in otherwords, you don’t really care that Android is badly programmed and that its user experience is pain. It’s more tweakable than iOS and that’s all you need.
Fair enough, but that isn’t really what most people are looking for.
In regards to Windows 8, we already know what it’s going to do to the mobile market: nothing. Metro has been completely rejected by the market(see WP7), and so has the concept of fullblown Windows running on a mobile device for only, let’s see, the past 10 years.
Microsoft has basically bet its entire future on an insane suicidal strategy of combinging two proven losers, and they somehow think this will result in winning.
Err, wait, no… I mean, surely this will bring Microsoft victory! Hear that Ballmer? Just stay the course, bro. Stay the course.
Thats exactly the point android on the right hardware, basically high end phones only every thing else leaves a lot to be desired, but i suppose that why apple has one platform cause it just works
I have a Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean as well as a 4S.
I have solved all the problems I had with it.
I lowered my expectations.
You might prefer iOS but Julian is right. Android has a much bigger (and growing) marketshare and does have more functionality. iOS is currently pretty static. Even the lock screen is pretty much the same since 2007.
Why would a company with the largest market share cancel a system? Cue the fanbois in 3..2..1
Keep defining market share by units sold, fine by me. I define market share in terms of *profits* generated. By that definition, which company again is leading in smart phone market share, hmm? That’d be Apple. Thank Bastet I bought Apple when it was $13/share. Pre-split.
Apple really nailed it with iOS, even my 84 years old mom can use her iPhone and iPad, or anybody elses. The idea is to keep the interface as simple as an old telephone, not to customize it too much, even I can see lot of fun in it.
My fun is in different cases, some keep the iPhone better in the pocket, some make it easier to pull it out, some have extra battery or video projector, some are for accessories such as tele lens.