I finally got a smart phone, a Nexus S Android. It is really slick. Overall I am quite pleased with it. Some of the features are impressive, like the phone functionality, how much you can customize, Widgets on the screen allowing instant access to information; things like that set it apart from the iOS devices in good ways.
I’ve never had a phone that gets how I want to manage calls and helps me do it as well as this one. It keeps surprising me with litte tricks and useful approaches to contact and call management. For example, I set my wife as a favorite, and the first time I tapped it asked me which number of her’s should be the default. I chose her cell, and now when I tap that favorite it dials her cell phone. It’s things like that.
And having the intertubes on tap is addicting. And even sometimes useful!
But there are a few cons to the Android that I’m still trying to adjust to.
No iTunes. I know, I know, some people are cheering and toasting to an iTunes free future, but I like it. A lot. It made managing my music easy, easy to sync between it and my old iPod Touch, easy to sync photos, easy to keep track of playcounts, and iTunes U has been a source of delight and entertainment for me. All gone, and now I have to figure out ways to replace that functionality.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the music player. Compared to the awesome iOS player, it sucks. I mean, yes, it plays music. And it ties into the Google Music beta cloud storage. But there aren’t controls on the lock screen to manage playback, I have to unlock the phone to do so. There is no slick UI for scrubbing at different speeds, it doesn’t say how much time is left in a track, a feature I have found really useful for iTunes U podcasts among other things.
Android Kindle app isn’t as neat as the iOS version, no way of Tweeting highlighted passages yet. I hope they have plans for that, I had been keeping notes that way.
LDS Gospel Library app is another one where the iOS app is nicer, e.g. the footnotes aren’t as neat as the iOS version, no multiple windows, you can only hightlight the entire verse and not just parts of it, etc.
What Knot To Do In The Greater Outdoors by Columbia, awesome app, only for the iOS and I haven’t found anything as slick in the Android app market.
None of which are deal breakers, more like mild annoyances that I’m hoping will be overcome in the future.
One of biggest differences that I see in philosophy between Apple and Google is Google is mounting a big push to move as much as they can of your stuff onto their cloud servers and using your Android device as way to access and create content, and while Apple is moving to support storage in the cloud, they are still letting your desktop hold your stuff and using it to sync with iOS devices. Another difference is the Google ‘open market place’ approach verses Apple’s ‘walled garden’, but enough digital ink has been spilled over that already, no need for me to add anything else. It’ll be interesting to watch it play out.
I went with the Nexus because I like the open market app store, I like the integration with Google and I’ve always wanted my own replicant* 
Plus, Sprint was selling it for $50.
After using both iOS and Android, I can recommend either. Both are good, the iOS is more polished and I believe is a better user experience right now, but Android isn’t far behind and with Google buying Motoral Mobile, they are in it for the long haul.
* “More human than human.”
