Why Switch from iOS to Android?

Switched from iOS to Android - The one-year marker.

I switched from iOS to Android for a few different reasons. One reason was price, the price of the iPhone was just out of my reach, by a long way. I have seen that there was a well-known Apple journalist that had changed to the Samsung Galaxy S3 and was very impressed with it. I wanted to get a phone with a larger screen and have a phone that in my price range would do more things. So one year later following my switch from iOS to Android I can tell you that I'm still very pleased with my decision. I haven't been able to get the phone upgraded to the latest version of the Android operating system and it looks like the phone carrier will not be pushing out the update any time soon. That is one of the bad things about the Android method of system updates, but there is a way to get around it. The solution to this problem is to root the phone and to put something else on there and I opted to go for CyanogenMod. The latest version of this CyanogenMod version of the operating system I have been using has been very stable and I can't even remember the last time that the phone gave me any sort of weird problem.

What do I miss from iOS

To be honest, I miss very little from iOS and this is not just because I still have my iPhone and my iPad to play with from time to time. I never did much of the video editing on iOS even though it was possible and did a great job of it. So it doesn't bother me too much that the Android video editing software is absolute rubbish. I do record audio into the Samsung Galaxy S3 and into my Nexus 7 although I prefer to use the iOS application called Twisted Wave. The audio recording software on iOS is much better, but Audio Evolution Pro does work well enough and I have used this to record a number of AudioBoo David Allen Wizardgold podcasts. I can record the audio well enough despite the fact that there is the automatic gain control on the Android devices, I would prefer to set the gain manually within the application. A couple of times I have managed to clip the audio recording and I just hadve to be careful how close I put the microphone to my mouth.

The advantages of changing to Android from iOS

The best thing about changing to Android from iOS is the fact that I have alternative keyboards that I can use. On the occasions that I go back to iOS and use it for entering data it annoys me to see that the letters on the keyboard don't change to show whether you are typing in a capital letter or a lowercase letter. The Android keyboards are much better. Even better still, with Android it is possible to use alternative keyboards such as the keyboard called SwiftKey or Swype. For a long time I was using the SwiftKey keyboard because of the spooky way that it knew which word I was going to type next, this made it incredibly quick to enter text into my Android devices. The only thing was, was that I was not terribly happy with the way that the dictation worked with regards the British English punctuation. So I started to use Swype instead and I find that I really prefer how the dictation works and sometimes I'm amazed at how fast I can get text into my Samsung Galaxy S3 or Nexus 7.


Read more about my change from iOS to Android

I am using the iPad again!

For quite a long time now been using the android devices without ever going back to using the iOS mobile computers. No, I tell a lie I have now and then used the TwistedWave application on the iPhone. I do have Audio Evolution Mobile for recording audio on my Android devices but I think TwistedWave is much better still. Today though I am working at the campsite and I have the iPad with me as well as having my android devices and just for fun I'm having a play with it. I had to install some of the applications that I had on before such as Drafts. With this post I am using Siri for dictation to dictate directly into the Blogger app. I am desperately missing the good keyboards that I have on my Android devices, but using Siri for dictation isn't too bad.

One of the reasons that I decided to give it a go for the moment is because somebody was asking me about what apps they should use on an iPhone for blogging. In the past I have used an application called Blogsy which is a very good at blogging application. Unfortunately that is just for the iPad and I don't have an iPhone version. So I have suggested to her that she tries out of the Blogger application from Google so that she can do her blogging. I don't think that they Blogger application is as fully featured as the application Blogsy, but it is alright.

I have also just been reading an article written by something also tried out using android after being an iPhone user and he found that the experience was okay. The only thing about changing platforms is that when you have been using an iPhone for some time you will have a lot of applications that you have paid for and will be too invested in that platform to want to make a change.

Obviously, there are some differences between the way of the two platforms work and when you try android for the first time it will seem a little bit strange. For me it didn't take too long before I talk to it, in fact I think I took to it like a duck to water. Some of the things that you do with a system becomes ingrained into your very psyche and you need to really think about how to work on the different platform.

With using iOS again for the first time in a while I have really missed the good keyboards that are available for Android. One thing that I do like with Android is that I'm finding it very easy to position the cursor exactly where I want it in the text. It is nice to hold down the touch and to get the magnifying glass and then move the cursor to just the right point in the word.

Longer life with an Android Phone

ZeroLemon a bigger battery and longer life

One of the best things that I have bought for the phone is the ZeroLemon which doubles the size of the battery physically. Before I was only getting about, between half a day and a full day of phone use. With this new battery I can go for about two and a half days and still have 15% to 20% left in the battery. I did buy other standard size batteries, but I found it to be a nuisance to have to swap the batteries over and to make sure that the spare ones were always charged up.

Keeping in a case or not

I do prefer to have the phone inside a case and to have a case that folds over to protect the front of the phone. With this ZeroLemon battery and the case that comes with it I can't fit into the case that I have. I could put a plastic protector screener protector screen on the front of the phone, although I have found it just as handy just to be careful where I keep the phone. So I wouldn't want to put the phone into a pocket that already had loose change in there or a set of keys. So far this is working very well and I don't have any scratches on the front of the phone.

The joys of mobile Android computing

I have been an Android user now for about seven months and generally I am very happy with the way that it hss worked out going from iOS to Android. I can do all of the things that I wanted to do with a mobile device that has a bigger screen and just about all of the apps that I need to get things done. The only thing that is a little bit of a problem is the fact that it can be difficult to get upgraded to later versions of the operating software. As the phone is not one of the Google phones such as the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 5, which would be getting the over the air updates in a fairly timely fashion; as I have seen with the way it works with the Nexus 7 that I own. There has been no word from the phone company to let me know that there was any updates available to the Android operating system since I bought the phone. In fact, when I got the phone it was already one version behind the latest that was available. So it has been necessary to root the phone and to upgrade it by getting my hands on other versions of the operating system. Lately I have been using the CyanogenMod versions for the Samsung Galaxy S3 which have nearly got me up-to-date.

Keeping an Android phone up-to-date

Rooting the Android phone wasn't that difficult and once I had done that I was able to run a few applications that allowed me to update the phone. It also allowed me to run one or two other applications that I wouldn't have been able to run with the standard operating system that came with the phone directly from the carrier.

Yesterday I heard from a contact on the Google+ social layer that there was a newer version available for the Samsung Galaxy S3 and that it was stable. I had been using an application called ROM Manager to do the operating system updates. I was able to download the necessary file from the proper place and use ROM Manager to do the install. On the first attempt it didn't go very well as it complained about the lack of space to do a backup first. I tried it again but without the backup and this time the new version of Android was installed. For the most part, now it is working although there are a couple of applications that have gone missing in action and the ROM Manager itself has stopped working. I am now thinking of doing a factory reset to completely clean the phone and to start again. The reason I am thinking this is because the phone seems to be rebooting itself too many times. So not as stable as I was informed.

How do I go about resetting an Android phone

I can't use that application ROM Manager to put things back as it was, because that is not working any more. I do have another application which has backups called Nandroid Manager and maybe that is the way to go. There is also the CyanogenMod installer that I now have on my Mac and I already have the files necessary to go back to the previous version of Android. That previous version had been working out better, in as much as it wasn't crashing as many times as this new one.

The thing that would be a problem is that I would have to reset up many of the applications that I have already. Messing with with passwords and also some of them have data that I might want to keep. So if I do do some sort of drastic reinstall like that I could be creating quite a lot of work for myself. Another thing that is a little bit of a problem is that many of these applications that I would like to use, are short on information on how to use them. I could easily also be creating more problems by killing my phone completely if I don't fully understand the processes that I need to do. Certainly, it is true to say that I don't fully understand how all of this works as I am not a complete Android nerd. I think I might still be thinking about it for a couple of more days before deciding which way to go with this.