After a few years of using Android, I received an iPhone 4S (Verizon network) to use for a consulting project. I’m experimenting with using it as my primary phone.
One of the things that I have liked best about Android is how easy it is to set up a new phone by typing in one’s Gmail account name and password (just once). This automatically syncs calendar, contacts, email, etc.
For a Gmail user such as myself, the process of setting up the iPhone is not simple and involves Googling for a variety of tutorials. The first step is to set up the phone with one’s Apple ID. In addition to entering the username and password on the phone, I had to respond to an email message from Apple asking me to verify my Apple ID and password. Thus did I have to type in Apple ID and password twice.
Next step was trying to use Gmail and sync contacts and calendar. I downloaded the Gmail app from the App Store and typed in my Gmail account name and password. This populated the Gmail app with mail but did not sync calendar or contacts. So I went to the Settings -> Mail control panel and selected “Gmail” as an account to add. At the cost of typing in my name, Gmail username, and password, this synced mail, calendars, and notes, but not contacts. The Google help page on the subject says that to sync Gmail contacts one tells the iPhone that one is using Microsoft Exchange and then follows a series of instructions with server names to type in.
Back in 2008, I started picking out “Favorites” on a series of Android phones. Google puts these into a “Starred in Android” group. You would hope that these would be automatically mapped into the “Favorites” contact group on a new iPhone, but they aren’t. The Favorites group remains empty even after all of one’s contacts have been sync’d.
By the end of the set up process I think that I’d typed in my Apple ID and password at least twice and my Gmail username and password three or more times. Typing passwords on the virtual keyboard was much more difficult than on the Droid 2 physical keyboard.
One good thing about Android phones is that they don’t further clutter my house with cables. I keep micro-USB and mini-USB cables permanently attached to my desktop computer and use them to charge a variety of devices from different manufacturers. Neither cable works with the iPhone, which requires a custom cable.
Siri works better than expected as far as speech-to-text is concerned, but has a way to go in common sense reasoning. For example, I asked “Will the weather be nice on Thursday?” Siri correctly recognized the words but said “no”. The forecast was for sunny skies and 50 degree temperatures. That’s pretty nice for December 1 as far as most folks in Massachusets are concerned, but Siri apparently differs.
Question: What do folks like to use for turn-by-turn navigation (voice prompts) on the iPhone? I haven’t yet figured out how to get that out of the built-in Maps application.
[Oh yes, how does it work as a phone? So far, not so great in an area of weak coverage that I call “my house”. With the Droid 2 I could make and receive calls inside the house, though the sound quality was better stepping outside. With the iPhone, the phone will ring but the call drops after a minute or two unless I walk outside. This could become an issue in January…]
I use waze: http://www.waze.com/
It’s not quite as good as Google Navigation, but it gets the job done.
Hi Phil,
I use MapQuest (free) for voice-prompted navigation. Works great!
…And Foreflight for flight planning and aerial navigation 🙂 (Student pilot at 6B6 and close to my checkride). Hey, they should put voice prompts in that: “You’re 5 miles right of course”, “Contact the tower at KASH.”…
Craig
For navigation Navigon is not free, but works very well. I have the East Region version. Fun feature: by default it will say ‘caution’ when you exceed the speed limit by a set amount. I find that helpful.
I use the TomTom app. I also bought their window-mounted base.
Siri’s concept of “nice” weather may be relative to Cupertino. That doesn’t leave much latitude for places like Boston (or much of the rest of the planet). Should be possible to fix, since Siri know’s where you’re located.
Similarly, I found getting Apple’s iCloud eco-system (email, contacts, calendars, reminders, bookmarks, notes, photo stream, documents & data, and phone location) much harder to get setup on Android, than on the iPhone, where I just entered my AppleID once. ;-P
Matt: The fact that Android doesn’t make iCloud easy isn’t a comparable situation. http://blog.mailchimp.com/major-email-provider-trends-update-gmail-pretty-much-caught-up/ shows that the Google cloud has one of the world’s largest user communities. The number of people using Apple email (me.com?) or iCloud was’t even worth putting on the chart.
A competent engineer who makes a phone to sell to consumers would try to make it easy to set up with the email/calendar/contact services that consumers are already using. The alternative is wasting literally millions of hours of customers’ time.
It has nothing to do with competent engineering.
Marketing explanation: Apple’s options are superior, and don’t spy on you.
Cynical explanation: Apple and Google are playing a high stakes game here and have no incentive to grease wheels for each other.
Pragmatic explanation: Google doesn’t publish or guarantee all of their APIs, and Apple doesn’t want failures outside their control to reflect on Apple.
Most people should be able to agree with at least two of the above, many agree with all three.
Phil:
Is your Android also on the Verizon network? If so, I’m disappointed to hear that Apple is still making inferior phones in terms of RF reception, and that the 4S doesn’t appear to completely fix the horrendous performance of the 4 (with the famous “you’re holding it wrong” issues).
I use MapQuest (which is free) and MotionX GPS Drive (which is not free but still pretty cheap).
If you had used the built in email client instead of the Google Gmail app, you would have saved several steps including re-entering credentials. I’d certainly hope that Google’s Android connection to Gmail is easier than Apple’s considering they wrote and control both.
Yes, the Apple connector is specific, but at least it is a single connector for iPod, iTouch, iPhone, IPad, etc., rather than a mix of microUSB, minUSB and standard USB, some of which provide charging and some of which don’t. Plus the single connector can be used for video output rather than just low speed USB. And you can use it for USB if necessary as well. I don’t see any way in which a microUSB is better in terms of functionality.
Is there any Apple product you’ve ever liked, or are you negative on principle?
* prevelance of email systems doesn’t matter. google’s android competes with apple’s ios — of course it’s a comparable situation. each will make their service easiest to set up on their own devices. is the extra 20 seconds to verify account info on setup really that big of a problem?
* google has a bunch of weird details that many other email / calendaring clients aren’t going to support. same goes for any of these services. compromise is necessary.
* it’s obvious that using physical phone keyboards for years and then starting out on the iphone keyboard might be a potentially jarring experience, but it doesn’t take long to adjust. i don’t know how people are able to type with their thumbs — i just use an index finger. i can type just as fast as i had on anything else.
* at my place, i’ve got an original iphone, my 4S, an ipod and an ipad sharing a single cable connector. maybe it would be nice if all cables were compatible with hardware across the board, but i think it’s safe to assume you might want to have your android and iphone plugged in at the same time… so you’d still be using two cables anyway.
* siri works pretty well for certain things and does show huge potential. it is worth the effort to correct its interpretation of the commands you give as it becomes more accurate over time. i don’t bother typing notes or texts anymore as siri is simply more convenient. same with the setting of alarms or reminders.
when you asked about the weather, did you check what was reported in the weather app? it gets its info from there (or rather, yahoo.) i asked if the weather would be nice on thursday and siri said it thought it would be (70′ / no rain). i also asked about saturday, and it said didn’t look like it (60′ / high chance of rain).
maybe it considers 50′ too cold. i sure do.
* phones are phones and service is service. it all sucks in one way or another, you just find the one that gives you the least crap. my 4S has the best reception of any phone i’ve ever had (without the “antenna issue” mentioned by birge), but it’s not like other phones might have even better reception.
One area which Android is extremely far behind is car OEM integration. Very very few manufacturers offer android-dock plugs, whereas many many more offer Apple iphone/pod plugs.
David: I did use the built-in email client! I also have the Gmail app. So far I think that I like the built-in Mail client better.
USB wouldn’t be adequate for video? Hmm.. USB 2.0 is spec’d to 480 Mbit/second. USB 3.0 is spec’d to 5 Gbit/second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats indicates that even a Blu-Ray disc is only about 54 Mbit/second. Empirically I have noticed that I can transfer AVCHD videos from a Sony 1080i camcorder much faster than real time via USB 2.0. I wouldn’t say that USB is better than whatever the proprietary Apple format is, but USB works with my Sony camcorder, my Canon cameras, my Flip video camera, my other phones, etc.
What Apple products have I liked? I sort of liked the original iPods, though I would have preferred a dedicated volume control (I don’t like the device when it gets into a mode in which there is no way to adjust the volume without navigating through some menus.) I liked the original PowerBook laptops and Macintosh Common Lisp (I stopped using the Mac when I started using Web browsers because someone trying to browse the Web would cause the entire computer to crash on a regular basis; this was before the current generation of Unix-based Macs, of course). I loved the original Apple laser printers (remember that they cost $7000?!?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter
So far I have found iOS just a little confusing, e.g., to get into the Bluetooth area on Android is “Wireless and networks”, the very top option among the settings. The corresponding area on iOS is buried under “General” (and Wi-Fi is in parallel with “General”).
My favorite feature of the iPhone so far is the dedicated silent/not-silent switch.
I became an Apple fan since the 3Gs but I also own and use a Google Nexus S. I love Gmail and use booth Google and Gmail app on my iPhone/iPad.
I can highly recommend Spanning Sync for those using GoogleSync and Apple. This helps me to sync my calendars and contacts into the cloud.
Also, Apple has started to offer a Micro-USB dongle now:
Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter: Use this adapter to connect iPhone to a micro USB cable to sync and charge, or to a micro USB charger to charge.
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD099ZM/A
Phil,
I agree with Andrew that it has nothing to do with competent engineering; if Apple wanted the Google integration experience to be seamless, they would make it so.
Do you believe that finding the Bluetooth iOS settings confusing is an objective observation, or due to being used to the way things are done on Android? I access the Wifi settings on iOS several times per month, and have accessed the Bluetooth settings exactly once. For that reason, I appreciate the choice that Apple made. If I were coming from Android, though, I imagine it might feel confusing.
It will be interesting to see what you think about the iPhone after a few months.
Well your mileage may vary with the iPhone 4S, but I really do like mine. I prefer not to keep all my data with google and use hotmail and syncing with the PC is seamless thru itunes and my email works very well. Besides my “test drive” android phone does not sync with my itunes music.
On your request for a suggestion for a GPS app… look at the Garmin ( and be careful which one you buy.. DO NOT buy the ON-DEMAND ones (green icons) $49.99 which got re-priced to $.99 w/ subscription, but rather get the blue icon ones which are on-board ($ 49 for CONUS, $59 for NA) which download the entire maps onboard.
On the other hand, do download the Motion X GPS DRIVE for $ .99 which gives you a monts worth of voice navigation to test drive , and $9.99 (currently) a year to subscribe. I am experimenting with this currently and really like it, even if it does use the data connection to download maps (although you could plan your route ahead when you are using wifi instead of 3G and ask it to download the route data ahead of time). The other issue would be that the Iphone must either be connected to the car stereo via USB interface (modern cars or sound systems) OR via bluetooth that uses AD2P ( i think i have that acronym correct) for the directions to play on the car stereo and it even mutes your music if the music source is itunes while giving directions. I have an older stereo with direct ipod connection to which I leave a different ipod permanently attached (since the stereo takes over the ipod control locking me out). And I connect my iphone via an older bluetooth connection to my car that does not utilize AD2P protocol, so I cannot hear the directions thru my car sound system. If you either plan to connect to your sound system via audio out, USB connector or AD2P Bluetooth, I doubt there is much better than the Motion X if you dont mind downloading maps. If you are travelling in the boonies, go with the garmin. Also, Motion X gives walking directions whereas it is unclear if the garmin software for the iPhone does. Garmin will also make you pay $20 a year for map updates + $ 20 year for traffic.. whereas with motion X, the downloaded maps are cached and for new maps you simply clear the cache, traffic info is also inclued in the price. Hope this helps you.
I used to use http://nuevasync.com/ when I had an iphone to sync my google calendars and contacts (over the air). It worked pretty well, this was years ago… so ymmv.
I’m also an android user, I just upgraded to the galaxy nexus, if that’s an option for you when verizon starts to carry the phone next month it might be worth looking into!