iPhone versus Android for an ubergeek (no holy wars, please)

August 25, 2010 1:01 PM

I'm looking for experiential narrations of what it's like to own and use an iPhone or an Android phone as an ubergeek. This will help me decide what to do now that my non-smart T-Mobile phone is starting to die.

I've been a T-Mobile customer for long enough that I'm not on a contract with them (so I can switch to AT&T, for instance), and my Nokia 5310 MP3-playing phone is starting to die (the keyboard is unreliable - I've taken it apart and cleaned it and the keyboard is a membrane keyboard, so I don't think I can really maintain it any better than that). I like the 5310 well enough but work-wise it's starting to look like it would be a good idea if I had at least a Blackberry (something I could use to really read and answer e-mails over a cellular network of some kind).

I've also done some homework:
- I've looked at the iPhone plan with AT&T and I know that I can afford it and it's similar enough to what I already have with T-Mobile.
- I've read the relevant-looking Android and iPhone and smartphone AskMe posts (but if there's one you think I missed, please let me know)

I do have an Apple iPod Touch. I got it in September of 2009 and I've gotten some good use out of it. It's 32 GB, relatively fast and I've invested about $50 in apps (I also do not have any app-specific content, like iBook or Kindle reader content or anything like that). I know that if I moved on to an iPhone, I could use the same apps on the iPhone. I think that the differences between the Touch and an iPhone are small enough that I don't need a lot of info about using an iPhone, but if you've experience in particular features I'm interested in below, please do let me know here.

My primary curiosity is what it's like to geek out (with specific features below) with an Android phone, so I can try to figure out whether I want to deal with purchasing/finding parallel apps to the ones I have and like on the Touch or whether I figure going with an iPhone is likely to work out okay and I'm not missing out too much by not going Droid.

I should also note that I am not interested in jail breaking anything. I know it's easy to do but I'm not really willing to do the extra maintenance involved after jail breaking the hardware (like keeping up with firmware/OS updates and watching the jail break scene and having to be careful not to update until the updated version has a clear jail break path).

Also, price is not a huge object, but above $300 and a 2 year contract and it'll probably not be something I go for.

Here are the features I'm primarily interested in:
- Alternative input schemes (e.g. the Samsung commercial about breaking the world record)
- GPS applications
- Camera applications (including integration with social networking sites)
- Deep geeking (like console/ssh access to underlying OS, direct file access, access to files via USB, as well as telnet/ssh clients for accessing other systems)
- Crypto applications (including but not limited to high-grade trustable password/financial info wallets - like KeePass on full-blown computers)
- Office apps (I use QuickOffice on the Touch) integration with Google Docs, and e-mail)
- Games/Game Culture
- DJ/Beat Synthesis/Sampling
- Any other sort of deep geekiness (scripture, astronomy, math, pattern puzzles, network tools, etc.)
- Configurabilty of the phone (I set specific ringing profiles depending on what part of the on-call cycle at work I'm on - the full on-call, back-up only, and off - that's the primary phone configuration I'm interested in)

The primary philosophical problems I have with the iPod is that the OS does not allow me reasonably free access to the filesystem and the files that I own or created on it.

So if you can help me out by letting me know how your Android phone or how the non-jail broken iPhone works with respect to these features, that would be great. If you do regarding a Droid, it would be awesome to know which kind of Droid you have. Thank you in advance.

posted by kalessin to technology (27 answers total)

Android (Droid I) and iPod Touch user here.

Alternative input schemes: Swype is revolutionary. Couldn't move to iPhone just because of its lack of Swype.

GPS applications: Google's free navigation is great on Android

Games: forget Android for this. Way behind the iPhone

DJ/Beat Synthesis, etc: iPhone has Android beat hands down

Configurability: Android is much more configurable without having to root.

If iPhone had the following, I would consider switching:
- Verizon
- Swype
- user-swappable batter
- standard micro-usb charging and drive access
- micro USB
- configurability

It would be tough to give up the great Google integration (gmail app, Google voice, etc) as well.

Good luck. Not an easy choice.
posted by tom_g at 1:21 PM on August 25, 2010

(sorry: didn't preview)
That's swappable battery.
Also, the second reference to "micro USB" should be microSD.
posted by tom_g at 1:23 PM on August 25, 2010

Just thought I'd point out that Swype's fastest-texting world record was broken by an iPhone 4 user.
posted by General Malaise at 1:27 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thank you both. This is exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

The iPod has the Google App, but one of the most frustrating things about it for me is that Google Docs is read only. Do Droids actually let you do read/write Google Docs changes?
posted by kalessin at 1:35 PM on August 25, 2010

I'm a long time T-Mobile customer who has had an Android phone in the house for about 2 years (the very first G1). We recently upgraded to a pair of Samsung Vibrants between the wife and I, and I have a jailbroke iPhone which I would periodically put my SIM into just to use it for evaluating some web design my wife was doing.

In terms of hardware, the iPhone is a very solid device, literally. It feels good in the hand. But in every other respect, I'd stick with my Android. (the Vibrant isn't cheap feeling or anything, it's just much lighter than the iPhone, and it feels like it's going to slip out of my hand sometimes.)

The screen on the Vibrant is just astonishing. It's AMOLED and has a dedicated chipset which allows it to actually play HD video in realtime. The new iPhone retinal screen may also be good, but I haven't gotten to play with one yet.

Sound is about equal between the two, so I'd call that a wash.

Software for the Android is nicely integrated; because it's all Google stuff, everything I use on the web is tied right into the phone; contacts, email, voice, talk, all of it. And Google maps is just unbeatable. Particularly with the new turn by turn GPS interface which turns my phone into a proper automotive navigation device.

(Apparently there is some minor issue with the Samsung Galaxy GPS system that takes it longer to report an accurate position, but I haven't had any problems with it. The guy at the T-Mobile store said that a fix is in the work though.)

And Swype is one of those things that once you have it, you can't imagine ever going back to a different way of entering text on a phone. It got me over by BlackBerry addiction within minutes of using it. It comes as the standard input software on the Vibrant, (and maybe on the new Garmin phone).

The other Android phones that T-Mobile carries seem ok, the MyTouch slide looked promising, but once I saw that screen on the Samsung, I knew that there was no way I was going to be happy with anything less.
posted by quin at 1:40 PM on August 25, 2010

There are iOS apps that let you edit and save changes to Google Docs. But they're pricey by app standards and, judging from the reviews I've seen, not rock solid. With the current state of hostilities between Apple and Google, this may be a lingering nuisance.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:42 PM on August 25, 2010

Oh, the camera on the Vibrant is 5mp and can record in HD, but it lacks a flash. Probably one of the biggest drawbacks in my opinion, but it wasn't a deal breaker for me.

And for geeky stuff, Android supports Google Sky Map which lets you hold your phone up for a sort of augmented reality look at the starts. It's pretty slick.
posted by quin at 1:43 PM on August 25, 2010

Awesome feedback, thank you! I will be tagging best answers for pretty much all of this feedback, I just don't want to mark the question answered until there's more opinion/narrative proffered.
posted by kalessin at 1:46 PM on August 25, 2010

(Minor point of order: "Droid" is a particular brand of phones made by Motorola/Samsung and marketed by Verizon. "Android" is the operating system.)

I currently have a Nexus One, which is intended for developers and therefore a bit atypical compared to most other Android phones on the market. For one thing, the over-the-air firmware updates come straight from Google, so you generally get the newest OS versions before everyone else, without a lot of extra proprietary junk from the carrier. Also, it has no built-in restrictions on modifying the operating system — if you're willing to void the warranty, you can install any low-level software you want with no fear of Google breaking it later, and very little risk of messing up your phone if you do something stupid.

Right now the N1 comes with Android 2.2 ("Froyo"), like most of the other high-end Android phones. The biggest new features are tethering and a just-in-time compiler which drastically improves performance compared to previous versions.

Google Maps isn't bad on its own for GPS, and the (relatively new) turn-by-turn directions feature is quite good. There's also a separate My Tracks app for logging your position. If you just want to see your latitude and longitude, get GPS Status.

Google Docs (the website) is read-only in the browser, but there are some third-party applications that supposedly integrate with it. I haven't tried any of them. Believe it or now, Google Wave is actually pretty usable, read-write. Enjoy it while it lasts.

There are a few other killer apps: ShopSavvy and/or Google Shopper will let you scan a product's barcode and compare prices across a range of online and local retailers. Subsonic is an excellent program that runs as a server on your home PC and lets you stream and transcode music to your phone. And Google's voice recognition tech is uncannily good.

ConnectBot is a very good (free) SSH application, although it's not as nice on a touch screen as it is with is physical keyboard. It doubles as a local Linux terminal, but if you want anything more than really bare-bones command line tools, you'll need to install them yourself. Note that the stock operating system doesn't allow regular phone applications to get root access in any way; you can, however, get a root prompt with a USB connection to a computer with the Android SDK.

Even without modifying the OS, there are many more points of extensibility for app writers on Android compared to iOS. e.g. Tasker ($5) lets you set up rules to change your phone's settings or perform actions based on time, location, or a ton of other criteria.

The biggest downside of Android that I know of is that it's pretty hard to find good applications on the Market. It's not that the selection itself is terrible; it's just that the search functionality absolutely sucks. (Ironic, I know.) Try a third-party site like AppBrain and you'll probably get much better results.

Best of luck making up your mind!
posted by teraflop at 1:48 PM on August 25, 2010

Thanks teraflop!

For general information, it looks like if you're a member of Costco, phone prices are significantly cheaper (e.g. $99+2 year contract for a Samsung Vibrant GALAXY S instead of $199+2 year contract for the same phone direct from T-Mobile).

So I will keep that in mind - though Costco doesn't seem to sell the actual iPhone, even though they do sell phones for use with AT&T. Interesting.
posted by kalessin at 2:09 PM on August 25, 2010

- Deep geeking (like console/ssh access to underlying OS, direct file access, access to files via USB, as well as telnet/ssh clients for accessing other systems)

As teraflop wrote, ConnectBot is very good. I use it regularly to ssh into all kinds of machines. For secure file transfers there's AndFTP.

- Crypto applications (including but not limited to high-grade trustable password/financial info wallets - like KeePass on full-blown computers)

There's a user contributed KeePass application for Android, KeePassDroid. Works very well for me in conjunction with Dropbox.
posted by mqk at 2:10 PM on August 25, 2010

Most of the stuff I was going to mention has been covered, but there's also:

VNC - there are a couple of apps in the market
AppBrain Fast Web Installer - lets you install apps to your phone from your web browser (which really helps with the "market search sucks" problem)
All kinds of custom home screens (Home++, PandaHome, ADWLauncher, etc). I'm happy with Sense, so I haven't bothered with any of them...
Android Scripting Environment (Or SL4A now I guess)! Write scripts for your phone! Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell are currently supported.
Transdroid or other torrent management programs.
WiFi Analyzer helps you improve your wifi network.

Also, the newly opened Google AppInventor is pretty nifty too.
posted by natabat at 2:39 PM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Pricing: I've never bought a phone from them, but Amazon has the Vibrant for $70 w/ 2yr contract. (They had it for a penny one day last week, you might check gizmodo or lifehacker for other deals)

Camera flash: I'm another G1 to Vibrant upgrader, and I was really let down that the camera doesn't have a flash...but if you use the Night Mode, the pictures are great anyway. In a dark bar, the picture on my phone was much brighter than the actual room. I was skeptical when I heard similar claims, but now I'm a believer. [I'd still like the option of a flash, but...]

And you said you're not weighed down by a contract, but if you'd like to stay with TMO, they're launching (or possibly just announcing, with release date coming later) the G2/Vision/nameTBA, which will work on their HSPA+ (read: faster than 3G) network, has camera flash, and has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, if any of those perk your ears up and you end up choosing Android.
posted by bah213 at 3:31 PM on August 25, 2010

On my iPhone, Google Docs spreadsheets are editable in the browser. But not word processing docs.

I also have an original DROID and definitely don't like it as much. I tried Swype, but found that while it was good for words, it wasn't good for things like passwords or any weird kind of text like that. It was annoying to use it like a regular keyboard. I got tired of waiting for VZW to release froyo and rooted the phone and upgraded it myself. The phone doesn't seem to behave much better. It's still kind of laggy. I find the touch screen is not as responsive.

I do think that the iPhone could use some cool location based or background kind of apps like Tasker. It would be nice to automatically change my ringer profile based on location or time of day or whatever. Or automatically switch my phone to wifi and 2G if I hit a wifi network I automatically connected to and wasn't on a call.

There's also this cool wifi scanner for Android that helped me track down the channels with least interference at my house. For some reason, that kind of app is not allowed in the iPhone app store.

But I have to say that overall, I don't love the DROID. It feels a lot clunkier to me than the iPhone. And I had a PalmOS Treo for like 4 or 5 years. :) I only got my 3GS last summer.

The screen on the iPhone 4 is awesome. My sister and brother in laws have them and I am jealous. He travels a lot for business and their kids love facetime.

Google integration on the iPhone, with the exception of auto-syncing Picasa to your phone and of course Google Voice, is also great. Email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, etc are all easy to set up and sync. I didn't see much difference between Android and iPhone in that case.

I don't see the benefit to the micro-SD cards used in Android phones. Sure, they are interchangeable and all that, but the "main" memory that is used for app storage is fairly limited. Some apps (like games that have larger portions) can store data on the SD card. However, you can't store the apps themselves on the SD card.

Some general thought about the swappable battery. The only times that I would really need a swappable battery are the times that I don't have access to power. I have a charger in my house, in my office, and in my car. When I take long plane flights, I have an external battery that has a USB port on it, so I can use it with my iPhone or anything that uses a USB port to charge from. Of course, your usage situations may be different.

In terms of apps, the number and quality of apps in the iPhone store is vastly better than in the Android store. Plus, as noted, the Android store is tough to find stuff in. Which is weird for a company that prizes search so much. Search is pretty much the only real option for finding apps in the official Android app store.

Although, next summer when the iPhone 5 comes out, I'll evaluate it against the latest Android crop. Who knows what'll happen in a year.
posted by reddot at 4:04 PM on August 25, 2010

reddot, to be fair, with respect to Google Docs editing, what I found on my iOS4 iPod Touch is that you can "edit" Google Docs spreadsheets only so far as you can make direct data input. You cannot apparently edit any calculation cells or do any advanced editing. Good to know, but not ideal.

So everyone knows, I'm leaning toward keeping the iPod Touch as the games/beats/silliness/media platform and probably getting a Samsung Vibrant upgrade for my dying T-Mobile phone. The NexusOne is tempting for the ubergeek in me but I know that as tempting as it is and knowing that I would get the SDK set up on my computer, realistically I probably wouldn't do anything very complicated on the platform development-wise, so it would end up just being wanking. Besides, I think the Google AppInventor would slake that thirst sufficiently anyhow.

I'll keep this thread "open" by not marking any best answers yet until tomorrow morning, but thank you all for the additional information and your viewpoints. It really has helped a lot to know more details and things I would never have thought to ask about.
posted by kalessin at 6:45 PM on August 25, 2010

Not a Google Docs guy, but I have had both an iPhone 3GS and now a droid (Motorola Milestone? Tombstone? dunno - slide-out keyboard).

Other than the keyboard, I hate my droid. Battery drain is horrible, apps are sub-par and as soon as I can, I will be heady back to the iFold... (Even though I hate Apples' policies towards 3rd-party development, it truly "just works")
posted by jkaczor at 7:16 PM on August 25, 2010

Android can do pretty much everything you lay out save the following... strong out out of the box exchange support has in the past be lacking, though 3rd party apps usually fill the gap, and recent upgrades have made things better. Sampling music in real time has issues on because of how the OS works... this is being actively discussed because lots of people want to do it. Synthesis however works fine. Finally gaming is more developed on the iphone in some ways, though you get emulators on android, can play quake and doom, and there are some excellent games.

- Alternative input schemes (e.g. the Samsung commercial about breaking the world record)
That's Swype. There are multiple alternative keyboard implementations, several like this, predictive text ones, voice input from multiple providers etc.
- GPS applications (tons)
- Camera applications (including integration with social networking sites) (again tons, Twitter, facebook, foursquare, buzz any social network really)
- Deep geeking (like console/ssh access to underlying OS, direct file access, access to files via USB, as well as telnet/ssh clients for accessing other systems)
Yes to all of those, telenet and ssh.
- Crypto applications (including but not limited to high-grade trustable password/financial info wallets - like KeePass on full-blown computers)
There is a keepass implementation
- Office apps (I use QuickOffice on the Touch) integration with Google Docs, and e-mail)
Quickoffice is available, gdocs is available, and e-mail is strong. exchange support is perhaps slightly weaker then with the iphone out of the box on some phones, but there are good third party apps for that.
- Games/Game Culture Plenty of games, though if your looking for specific titles, often they haven't made the transition. On the other hand you can run quake and doom fairly easily, play emulated PS1, gameboy, nintendo and supernintendo games. No plants vs. zombies though. Gaming culture, there are site specific apps for stuff like g4,
- DJ/Beat Synthesis/Sampling Synthesis yes, but sampling real time is weak because of OS issues. It's being dealt with, but if you want it now, android is not as strong as the iphone.
- Any other sort of deep geekiness (scripture, astronomy, math, pattern puzzles, network tools, etc.) scripture tools for multiple religions, math, chess, pattern puzzles and tons of network type tools.
- Configurabilty of the phone (I set specific ringing profiles depending on what part of the on-call cycle at work I'm on - the full on-call, back-up only, and off - that's the primary phone configuration I'm interested in)You can do this with audiomanager widget, or tasker to do it automatically based on time/location.

The primary philosophical problems I have with the iPod is that the OS does not allow me reasonably free access to the filesystem and the files that I own or created on it.

So if you can help me out by letting me know how your Android phone or how the non-jail broken iPhone works with respect to these features, that would be great. If you do regarding a Droid, it would be awesome to know which kind of Droid you have. Thank you in advance.

Also some other stuff. with the newest version of the os, 2.2 you can store apps on the SD card. I'd strongly recommend getting a phone on t-mobile over ATT, since ATT bans sideloading of apps which allows you to do stuff like participate in closed betas/develop your own apps. The new samsung phones are excellent, hackable, and fast. and swype still holds the official world record for texting.
posted by gryftir at 8:32 PM on August 25, 2010

I've played with most the latest generation of phones and whatnot... I'm not really convinced any of them are that much better than the others. They're all pretty remarkable devices. I mean, the nerds at work wth rooted iPhones all seem to love 'em... as do all the guys with newest generation of Android phones. It's more of a question of form factor than anything.
posted by ph00dz at 8:53 PM on August 25, 2010

Quick note that if you're interested in Swype, there is a similar keyboard available on the iPhone (only for notes through): ShapeWriter.
posted by meowzilla at 10:56 PM on August 25, 2010

I agree with ph00dz. A geeky friend has just bought an iphone 4 and I've just bought a HTC HD2 purely to run the community port of Android on. And although I prefer my Android phone for some small reasons that matter to me (like just being able to drop music or whatever on it without frickin itunes and being able to swap out things like the keyboard or home screen) they're pretty damn similar in what they can actually do.

We both surf the web and email and track our cycling with endomondo and connect to remote servers etc. His screen has that high res thing, my screen is enormous (I seriously will never buy another phone with a sub 4" screen). Swings and roundabouts.
posted by markr at 11:30 PM on August 25, 2010

Thanks guys, I'm setting this resolved and marking best answers all around.

I think that I will do with geeking here what Chinese do with religion: Attempt to cover all bases. So I will probably run with the plan I outlined above and keep a toe in the Apple market with the iPod Touch (and heck, maybe upgrade it when upgrades come along) but move into the Android market for the phone, since I have the opportunity to.

I think I agree also with ph00dz and markr that it doesn't sound like one is any better than the other, just different, and I'd like to explore a market that has fewer restrictions on use than Apple has.
posted by kalessin at 4:47 AM on August 26, 2010

I might hold off on the Vibrant for a few more weeks, The G2 is scheduled to be released in Mid September and might be a worthy competitor.
posted by jrishel at 8:02 AM on August 26, 2010

Huh. Good to know. Thanks jrishel.
posted by kalessin at 9:27 AM on August 26, 2010

I went ahead and ordered the Samsung Vibrant Galaxy S from Costco ($50 less than ordering direct from T-Mobile for the 2 year discount as an upgrade). It should be arriving early next week. Thank you all for your input and valuable advice.
posted by kalessin at 6:23 AM on August 28, 2010

Phone in hand, data plan signed up for, I am very pleased so far, but worry about battery life. I did buy and install Tasker from the Android marketplace (missing out on encryption, apparently), but haven't had time to set it up - still setting up the rest of the system and configuring all the little twiddly configurations available. Very satisfying.

I also signed up for Google App Inventor but haven't yet had the sign-up approved. Given that I'm not in education, I don't know if that'll take a short or a long time, but we'll see.

The transfer of the SIM card was smooth as butter. The package I got included a bunch of extra stuff (T-Mobile is generally good like that, and these Wireless Advocates folks (Costco's Wireless partner) are also good about including bonus accessories), including an SD card adapter for microSD cards, so transferring the MP3 ringtones from the old phone to the new was also trivial.

There are many cool things about Android phones to gush about, and I'll do it elsewhere, but I think that in my case, the Android was the right choice for me.
posted by kalessin at 5:19 AM on September 1, 2010

My sweetheart wants to buy me a fancy phone for xmas! What should I get? Was it ever decided?

I am leaning Android, but what model should I get? I like the idea of the 4"+ screen.
I am in Canada too, so does that severely limit what I can do?

I know Iphone has much better games, but I think having MAME and SNES emulation on an Android phone is a dealbreaker that makes all other games obsolete...
Help!
posted by Theta States at 10:08 AM on November 2, 2010

You might want to ask your own question to get a few more replies. The list of Android phones with 4"+ screens looks something like: Sony Ericsson X10 (stay away, it only just got Android 2.1 last week and will probably never see 2.2), Motorola Droid X, Samsung Galaxy S (and the various nearly identical versions of it that the American carriers all seem to have) and the new HTC Desire HD. I have no idea what you could get in Canada.

If emulators are important to you you may want to consider a phone with a hardware keyboard so you have real buttons, I've found trying to play emulators with touch buttons annoying enough to have uninstalled all of my emulators. Off the top of my head I don't think you can get a hardware keyboard and a 4" screen at the moment.
posted by markr at 4:02 AM on November 3, 2010