How do you see Apple killing Android forever ?

[AQ_OC]

You must have missed the part about me loving my iPad. There isn't anything in the tablet arena that beats the iPad. Conversely, there re many Android phones that are much better, faster, thinner, faster, lighter than the iPhone. So I am not dedicated to either exclusively; just open minded enough to know which is better.

have you ever used an android phone?

Sent from my iPad 3rd Gen using ipf

Dude...I own a Droid Incredible that I used for two years up until last month. It runs GingerBread and is sitting right here...I still use it but not as a phone. I also own an Acer Iconia Tab A500 that runs Honeycomb. I must own as many paid for Android apps as I own paid for iOS apps (maybe more, but I have not counted). I also owned a Nook Color which I installed pure Android on (using the SD card so I could keep the Nook software intact). I gave that to my bother, though, and he has wiped the Nook software off of it complete and runs some Nook Android version. I'm actually planning to get another Android tablet, too. I had the Transformer Prime on pre-order but canceled it in January amist all the problems people where having. I'm looking at getting probably a Samsung something or other.

But you and others can say whatever you want concerning Android phones...I'm going to disagree all day long. Your experience is just that, your experience. Mine is my experience and it counts for me more than yours and others. You can't claim you're open-minded and then claim you know which is better. You have an opinion about which is better. And your opinion is just that, your opinion. The hassles I went through with my Droid Incredible from the end of 2011 to when I switched would not have existed on an iPhone. And if they did at least there would have been a finger to point at one entity: Apple. With the Android, you had both Google and HTC involved. The problem was due to HTC and they simply did nothing about it. And Verizon and Google were useless.

And lets not even talk about how sluggish HC is on my Iconia. I'm still waiting for Acer to release the update to ICS. Someone here claims that ICS on this tablet runs well, so I'm trying to hold out for that.

This model that Google is using is the same one that existed with Windows. Windows running on hardware from a zillion different vendors. Years and years of headaches with hardware, drivers, and this and that. Only now, with Windows 7, have the problems been worked through to a reasonable point to end users. The same is happening with Google on mobile devices. I'm convince they will eventually get it all right, but after a lot of crap in the mean time. And don't think I am unaware of all the issues that people have with the various Android phones. I've spent lots of time on the Android forums and the XDA Developers forums reading pages and pages of complains by users.

Finally, your comment about "much better, faster, thinner, faster, lighter than the iPhone" is simply beyond belief. Nothing I have done on the 4S is even remotely slow, so how in the world can your comment about other phones being faster have any relevance at all? Faster at what and what is that going to do for me, exactly? Likewise for lighter. I don't need the phone to be any lighter. This is totally meaningless. I don't need thinner either. I don't want bigger, this format is fine. It's about the same size as my DI...while all the new and best Android phones, the ONLY ones I would even consider, are huge, and heavier, too. They do look nice and have lovely screens, and 4G too, but they are too big. I'm not going to buy a dated phone, so the Bionic was out. Heck, HTC was out too. That left Apple and frankly, I see no loss in any way, shape or form. When I got my DI, it was one of the top Android phones and it served me well. But the Google/HTC mess just ruined it.

Anyway, I'm done with this Android vs iOS discussion. It's a time waster.

 

[Kaykaykay]

AQ_OC, I'm curious why you and others bought Android devices before going with iOS.

I've always wanted stuff that worked out of the box, and even cursory research indicated to me that many Android devices didn't, so I initially went with iOS to save myself time and frustration. (That's why I didn't go for any Android device till Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Note.)

 

[seneca18]

AQ_OC, I'm curious why you and others bought Android devices before going with iOS.

I've always wanted stuff that worked out of the box, and even cursory research indicated to me that many Android devices didn't, so I initially went with iOS to save myself time and frustration. (That's why I didn't go for any Android device till Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Note.)

Two reasons for me: 1) iPhone was not available for sprint simple as that.
2) Believe it or not I hated Apple with a passion. I hated the proprietary software, I could not understand for the life of me why people liked apple. Well that all changed when I received my iPad 2 last summer. Then it all went downhill from there. So basically I sold out or grew up (whichever) I just realized the convenience of the iOS ecosystem for me and my needs.

 

[CaptainObvious]

Like everything, both have their pro's and con's. Ive had an Iphone since 1st gen and last year i put up my Iphone 4 to try out a Galaxy S2. The tipping point for me was i got tired of staring at the 3.5in screen. The 4.5in Super OLED made doing things on the phone a lot easier for me. Android definitely has its share of vaults, but its come a long way in a short period of time. Two people in my family have Transformer Prime's and i have an Ipad2 and just recently got a 3rd gen. Having use both for an extensive amount of time, i give the Ipad the nod because of Icloud and the simplicity of clearly defined Ipad apps on the app store. Using a ps3 controller on terga 3 games like shadowgun takes tablet gaming to a new level.

 

[mlgb]

I have both an ipad and android tablets and apart from games, the android can do everything the ipad can, at least as well as the ipad does. There are some games, but not nearly as much as on the apple side. That said for general day to day things i use the android tablet much more than the ipad.

 

[KevTN]

It funny this war of android vs I whatever. Both have strengths and weaknesses. I like the android platform because I enjoy playing with custom roms and other stuff.

As far as importing your iTunes to android. Download double twist on your desktop and phone/tablet (free in the market) it will bring over everything from your iTunes and you put it on your android device.very simple.

 

[britpoper]

2) Believe it or not I hated Apple with a passion. I hated the proprietary software, I could not understand for the life of me why people liked apple. Well that all changed when I received my iPad 2 last summer. Then it all went downhill from there. So basically I sold out or grew up (whichever) I just realized the convenience of the iOS ecosystem for me and my needs.

iPad2 was also the one that changed me. I was once an Apple hater before I owned an iPad2.

As for the iOS vs Android debate, I don't see the benefit why we must doing it.
Each iOS and Android have plus and minus point. I agree with all of you that had said it's all matter of preference.
I do own both iOS and Android tablets (I have iPad2 and New iPad, I also own Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9"), and both tablets proven served my needs well.

 

[RodC]

Thankfully Android will be around for a very very long time. And I am grateful for it.

Apple has a target. Apple has a muse. Apple has a true competitor.

iOS will only get better because of Android.

Second that.

A fundamental downside of any Android tablet, however, the choppy graphic transition between screens. I have yet to see a tablet (or any Anroid device) which can compete in terms of graphic smoothness and liquescency the iPad/iPhone achieve. Easy to test: just swipe your finger on the Home screen of any Tablet and see the icons move - terrible!

 

[andrzejls]

I do spend a lot of time on Android forums...and on the hardware forum and a LOT of owners have complained bitterly about the problems with the prime (many have reported about the poor performance of wifi, and gps, and even bluetooth on the prime -- so much so that Asus is releasing a add-on device to address the gps issue). And what I meant about killing the prime is when you release a product in January and then announce that a revised model is coming out 6 months later, that effectively kills a product because many people will do just as I did, cancel their prime order and wait for the newer model.

Spec-wise, I don't see any real advantages in the prime over the iPad 2 or iPad 3, my reason for getting an Android is because I like tablets and I have a LOT of Android purchased software. It only makes sense for me to have both platforms. Otherwise, I lose my investment in apps. And I do like that I can dig in further with Android (though I am not convince this nets me much, as I can find ways to do all the same things in iOS). I'm a old ms-dos/vms/unix guy, so I have no issues with getting my hands dirty.

I don't know...I'm kinda disappointed in Asus over the last prime release. I bought my Acer Iconia A500 because I could not get my hands on the first Transformer....it was not in stock any where for a long time....and then I pre-ordered the Prime and it too was hard get...then the problems were discovered, so I canceled that order. I own an Asus motherboard...and will probably buy another one in a couple of years, but I'm not sure I want to trust Asus on their tablets. Just too many issues. We'll see. Maybe they will do better with the TF701 this summer. But I definitely won't be the first to get one. Too risky. I'm also not a fan of the form factor used on Android tablets. Movie watching should not be a reason to use a 16:9 form factor.

AQ_OC
I am like you old ms DOS (Dumb Operating System) and over 20 years UNIX sysadm (SUN ans Silicon Graphics) and this is one of the reasons I like Android OS (BTW UNIX based) and an ability to "mess around". As far specs comparison between iPad (dual core CPU and quad core GPU) and Transformer Prime (full quad core +1 CPU and 12 core GPU) there is really no contest. I am not even going to mention pitiful 0.3 MPix iPad front camera and 5 MPix back camera. For COL phones have better specs than that. Prime is the fastest tablet on the market and there is no dispute about that. I own Iphone 4 and I like it very much. When I transpose iPhone OS to the tablet, what is perfectly good for the phone, it becomes unacceptable on the tablet. Lack of expandability and access to filing system renders such tablet, for most part, useless. If you think about it, iPad is nothing more than iPhone without the phone, just larger. A lot of peoples talks about poor WiFi and GPS on Prime. IMHO WiFi os ok, GPS is useless, so Asus just issued, as you mentioned, "snap-on" dongle for full GPS at no cost to owners of the Prime (remember WiFi issue with iPhone 4 and rubber cover given away by Apple?). You also do understand, being former UNIX guy, that many users of Android OS are not "familiar" with it and complain about it. All electronic high end devices have some problems (iPad3 is not immune, WiFi and getting "hot") that we, end users have to deal with. Bashing one over the other (that does not apply to you) does not serve OA good of tablets technology. I hope that healthy competition between Apple and Android will result in rapid advance in technology and capability of tablets as well as smart phones.

 

[andrzejls]

One doesn't need iTunes to get apps, they come from the app store. I'm sure google is not happy about amazon selling apps, but there is no problem getting apps from one place....droid users did so to up until recently.

You can keep your fat phone, I don't need it. I made a decision not to buy one. There is no advantage to having such a huge phone.

I see no advantage to getting a phone with 16 GB internal and then being forced to turn right around an buy and plug in an SD card, which of course is treated as different storage than the main memory inside the device. That just makes the entire experience more complicated and time consuming to manage. You may think you are better off fiddling around with such nonsense, but that doesn't work for me anymore. I know I want a lot of memory so I just get want I need and not have to worry if I end up with a slow SD card.

Have you analyzed cost difference between buying 64MB phone verse adding micro SD Card. It might not make any difference to you, but some people like myself cannot afford Apple pricing and need to buy less expensive device with capability to add thinks to it (like memory) when they need it and when they can afford it.

 

[Kaykaykay]

Second that.

A fundamental downside of any Android tablet, however, the choppy graphic transition between screens. I have yet to see a tablet (or any Anroid device) which can compete in terms of graphic smoothness and liquescency the iPad/iPhone achieve. Easy to test: just swipe your finger on the Home screen of any Tablet and see the icons move - terrible!

I've seen none of this on my Samsung Galaxy Note.

 

[Skull One]

AQ_OC
I am like you old ms DOS (Dumb Operating System) and over 20 years UNIX sysadm (SUN ans Silicon Graphics) and this is one of the reasons I like Android OS (BTW UNIX based) and an ability to "mess around". As far specs comparison between iPad (dual core CPU and quad core GPU) and Transformer Prime (full quad core +1 CPU and 12 core GPU) there is really no contest. I am not even going to mention pitiful 0.3 MPix iPad front camera and 5 MPix back camera. For COL phones have better specs than that. Prime is the fastest tablet on the market and there is no dispute about that. I own Iphone 4 and I like it very much. When I transpose iPhone OS to the tablet, what is perfectly good for the phone, it becomes unacceptable on the tablet. Lack of expandability and access to filing system renders such tablet, for most part, useless. If you think about it, iPad is nothing more than iPhone without the phone, just larger. A lot of peoples talks about poor WiFi and GPS on Prime. IMHO WiFi os ok, GPS is useless, so Asus just issued, as you mentioned, "snap-on" dongle for full GPS at no cost to owners of the Prime (remember WiFi issue with iPhone 4 and rubber cover given away by Apple?). You also do understand, being former UNIX guy, that many users of Android OS are not "familiar" with it and complain about it. All electronic high end devices have some problems (iPad3 is not immune, WiFi and getting "hot") that we, end users have to deal with. Bashing one over the other (that does not apply to you) does not serve OA good of tablets technology. I hope that healthy competition between Apple and Android will result in rapid advance in technology and capability of tablets as well as smart phones.

Thank you for mentioning the Transformer Prime, it is the perfect example of why the Android OS is still learning to walk versus iOS which is already at a very healthy jog.

While yes, Linux is a direct rebuild and off-shoot of Unix lets make sure we keep one thing always in mind, Android is a Linux based OS with a Dalvik Virtual Machine for running 98+% of their applications. iOS is a pure Unix OS running 100% native code. That clarification is key to understanding why Android phones and tablets require more than twice and sometimes up to four times the CPU and GPU power to even compete with an iOS device.

Android is like Windows. Throw as much processing power as humanly possible and then pray the end user doesn't realize how bad the experience is. Lets review all the issues with Android and why it requires so much processing power.

1) 7 major screen resolutions with 4 major GPU designs.

This means every single screen IO draw requires that the programmer either directly address the screen or use an XML layout and pray the device maker tweaked all the math properly for their display. To deal with the GPU issues, the coder has to have a library of "optimized" code for that GPU design. And once their application is in the field then pray that a new device doesn't bog down under their design. The overhead this introduces is staggering in both code maintenance and overhead due to the translation needed to run on 170+ devices currently on the market.

2) Dalvik Virtual Machine.

Once considered the savior of Android because it would let any Java Application written with the Android SDK to work on any device regardless of CPU and GPU configuration, is now its direct Achilles heel. Which is why Google was finally forced to admit defeat and start developing the Android NDK (Native Development Kit) to start competing with iOS apps. Dalvik VM incurs so much overhead that a dual core CPU clocked at 1.5Ghz is still slower than a native iOS app running on a 800 Mhz dual core CPU. Pretty sad when you think about it.

3) Memory.

Where to even start with this one. Sure you can add more memory to an Android based phone but you incur a huge penalty in the process. First it has to transfer part of the app from the SD card to the main internal memory just to launch an app, you can thank the Dalvik VM for that. That's a dirty little secret that Android doesn't talk about. Having to have the code in two places just to operate properly. Then yf you have too many background processes running at once, Android sometimes has to abort loading and playing custom ringtones off of the SD card. And before you say "That problem is fixed!", don't kid yourself. They had to throw more CPU processing power at it to help MASK the issue, not FIX the original design flaw.

4) Applications.

Talk about a nightmare scenario. Android has a LOT of application. Each one wants to run code on boot up of the phone to instantiate its "hooks and special features" into the experience. This mean the average Android phone once loaded with all these great apps cause the phone to take longer to boot as well as, how do I put this, ah yes "settle down" just like a Windows PC before it is actually useable. Heck try making a call just after the lock screen pops up and watch how laggy things are if you don't wait another 30 seconds. That doesn't happen on iOS devices. Ever.



I could go on about the flaws in Android from a technical aspect, but I think the above is a good primer. Don't get me wrong, I am not an iOS fan boy. I can rip in to Apple very easily. But there is a difference. The issue with iOS are not hardware or OS based complaints. They are aesthetic issues like not being able to change the color of a text box in Message. Or not being able to natively side load apps. Or the lack of the Swype keyboard. But unlike Android when I reboot an iOS phone, the second that lock screen appears, I can swipe to unlock and make a call without any lag in the user interface. You can only do that with an Android phone if you haven't installed any applications and the phone manufacturer left the device as pure ASOP build.

Hopefully CPU and GPU manufactures will keep being able to design and build even faster processors for Android to finally overcome these issues without killing battery life in the process.

 

[Kaykaykay]

My main gripe about iOS is having to use iTunes to add non-iTunes content.

I like iOS's ease of use -- always have -- and I always look at devices from that perspective, depending on what my needs are.

With my Galaxy Note, adding non-iTunes content is a breeze, so that's a convenience factor for me. It's always a tradeoff, though, because Android has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. I actually prefer the uniform look of iDevices -- they look neater to me -- and I don't care to customize, so that's not a consideration for me.

I'd prefer that the SD card access for my Note not require me to pull out the battery to get to the card. But I've just found recs for 64GB SD cards that apparently work in the Note, despite its specs saying it will take cards up to 32GBs, so I'm happy about that and am waiting for my new 64GB cards to arrive.

 

[zphone]

I think Skull pretty much nailed it in the technical side. The key thing to understand is that apple made compromises on iOS to make the user experience easier and faster. Android includes 'features' that are just not ready for mass consumption. Sure you can have uncontrolled background threads but you also have to take the resource sucking runaway threads with that gift. Sure put any video directly on your device by dragging it in from windows. But you can also easily drag in files that cause issues and play at best like a YouTube video on a 56k modem. The new tech generation delights at these challenges, but some of us have been there done that and would like to move on.

The reason it's a compromise is that any feature you particularly like on Android adds quite a bit of complexity that most users just don't want to deal with.

And even tech people with a programming background (like myself) that are over the giddy coolness of something they can do on android prefer the experience of iOS. That said I still like to jailbreak so I can have a more unix like experience on my iPhone and hopefully soon my iPad, but as said that probably affects a very small group of users.

Next time you like something particularly cool on android try talking about it with your next door neighbor or the CEO of your company and watch their eyes glaze over.

 

[Kaykaykay]

I think Skull pretty much nailed it in the technical side. The key thing to understand is that apple made compromises on iOS to make the user experience easier and faster. Android includes 'features' that are just not ready for mass consumption. Sure you can have uncontrolled background threads but you also have to take the resource sucking runaway threads with that gift. Sure put any video directly on your device by dragging it in from windows. But you can also easily drag in files that cause issues and play at best like a YouTube video on a 56k modem. The new tech generation delights at these challenges, but some of us have been there done that and would like to move on.

The reason it's a compromise is that any feature you particularly like on Android adds quite a bit of complexity that most users just don't want to deal with.

And even tech people with a programming background (like myself) that are over the giddy coolness of something they can do on android prefer the experience of iOS. That said I still like to jailbreak so I can have a more unix like experience on my iPhone and hopefully soon my iPad, but as said that probably affects a very small group of users.

Next time you like something particularly cool on android try talking about it with your next door neighbor or the CEO of your company and watch their eyes glaze over.

I'm not techie -- just using what's convenient, which is why I started off with iOS devices. With my Galaxy Note, the ease of dragging and dropping music and movies is about convenient access to content, which is my key reason for owning mobile devices. I'm not interested in technical feats. Ideally, any device I own should allow me not to even think about its platform -- it should just work.