[General Topics] dikai_yang:
I used to be a iPhone fanboy and somewhere along the way I thought I'd give Android a try and I got myself a Samsung SGS2. There must be a lot of people out there in the fruit cult wanting to be brought to the green robot cult or vice versa. Here's my complete NON-BIASED story that might help you out with consideration of both the user experience and the technical side of things.

WARNING: This is a looooooong story. So if you're not into a good long thread, please skip.

NOTE: The iPhone being discussed is a jailbroken, fully utilized iPhone. A non-jailbroken iPhone cannot come even close to the SGS2.

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APPS:

Surprisingly, the Android Market and the Apple AppStore are not created to be equal. Although most of the popular apps like Facebook, eBay, Google apps are available on both stores, the Apple equivalent apps are usually several versions ahead (i.e. Navigon, Tunein Radio, etc.) except for the Google-centric apps and/or other apps that I don't typically use. The apps simply look / feel better on an iPhone. But for sure they run faster on the SGS2 hands down. There's IXX0XX on the iPhone for the *free* apps. The Android-equivalent AXX, BXX, 4XX, etc simply cannot compete against it. Although it's much easier to find *free* Android apps from all over the place, IXX0XX, as a centralized place to go, has all of the popular high-quality paid apps/games, up-to-date version.

RESOLUTION / SCREEN SIZE

I don't know why people always want a 4.3", 4.5" or even bigger screen on a phone. For me, as long as the same amount of information can be displayed on a screen, that's what counts. The SGS2 screen is huge compared to the iPhone, and certainly things do appear bigger and easier to read. However, the iPhone resolution is just much higher. If you look very closely on an iPhone 4 screen, you simply cannot see the pixels, whereas for the SGS2 (non-HD version), it's just like every other smartphone, you can see the pixels (but not so bad). Why does this matter? Say, you open a webpage in overview on an iPhone, it's almost like the letters that are too small to see is because my sight is not good enough to read it. But with the SGS2, the letters that are too small to see is because the screen doesn't have a good-enough resolution to display it. This is the best way I can put it. The text does appear much sharper on the iPhone.

PHONE QUALITY / FEEL

This is really a personal preference. The SGS2 has a huge screen, so it is bigger. Both look very slick. I like the weight of the SGS2 because it feels much lighter so if I ever drop it, it *should not* be destroyed. The iPhone is a little too heavy. Heavier = Better Quality? I don't think so. Some people complain that the back cover of the SGS2 is just soft plastic. It feels quite good though. The textured surface prevents fingerprints. The iPhone is only good in terms of its size. I can do one-handed operation where my thumb can pretty much reach both sides of the screen. The SGS2 is slightly too big where it's not too comfortable to use it single-handedly over a long period of time.

ROOTING V.S. JAILBREAKING

Android ROOTING = iPhone JAILBREAKING. It is so much easier for the Android to be freed. You simply flash a rooted kernel, then you're "jailbroken" no matter what firmware version you have. Everytime an iOS version comes out, we have to wait for the Dev team to find a new security loophole in the firmware in order to get a jailbreak. Note that Apple appears to be hiring these bright guys one by one. Even if you can get a tethered jailbreak, it is still not acceptable. If your iOS ever crashes, you need to plug in your computer to properly boot the phone. What I really like about Android is that you can do everything without a computer (once rooted). You can flash new kernels, new ROMs, complete restore (nandroid), all without a computer. With an iPhone, if you want to reflash your firmware to newer/lower version, you need to be beside a computer, even for restoring apps / app settings.

BACKUP / RESTORE

On an iPhone, you cannot do a true "complete backup" because everytime you want to install a firmware to the phone, the firmware needs to be signed by Apple (or Tinyumbrella with your SHSH). And naturally, your saved data cannot be integrated to this "firmware". With the SGS2, there's a system partition and a user partition. And you can do a "nandroid" backup, which is a complete image of your system (think Norton Ghost or Acronis Home Image), saved on your sdcard partition or EMMC (external sdcard). On the iPhone, you need PkgBackup to backup your Cydia apps (as a list, now with settings as well), and Chronus to backup your AppStore apps. After the backup, you must copy the backup files (at least for Chronus) to the computer because you only have a single partition on the iPhone. A wipe will take your backup with it. On the SGS2, we can use CWM to do a complete system image as mentioned above, or use TitaniumBackup for individual apps (this includes both the app itself and the settings). If you use CWM, once restored, your phone is EXACTLY the way you left it. With TitaniumBackup, it's even a greater concept because you can constantly backup updated apps individually whereas with CWM you have to do a system image everytime. So this means the apps become like "modules" that you can put on different ROMs for instance.

LATEST PHONE??

The good thing about Apple is that once you get the iPhone of the year, you know you have the latest and greatest of that year because of the steady annual release. As for Android, once you buy one, another manufacturer might come up with a better (if not better, a slightly different hardware offering) phone that makes you wonder if you should've waited. This brings us to fragmentation. There are so many Android phones with all kinds of hardware combination and you just don't know which one is the best. As of this writing, the SGS2 is the best available phone IMHO, the SGS2HD is the even better one yet to come. But if you want a balance of specs and price, there are too many to choose from.

FRAGMENTATION / NOKIA

Why the heck would I mention Nokia here? In my opinion, I think one of the reasons why Nokia failed is that it tries come create so many differnt phones to suit the different needs of everybody whereas Apple created a phone that is good for all. Even worse, Nokia will create two phones with similar specs, and one phone will have a need-to-have feature while lacking one need-to-have feature, which appears on the other phone, which is itself not perfect. This is crap. They have the power to give you everything you want but they don't. With Apple, the user experience is the same for everybody. With an Android, I am hoping it doesn't get to the level of how Nokia played the game. Think of iPhone as a PS3 while the Android is a PC. A PC is all powerful, you can have different amount of RAM, different video cards, etc. Every PC user will tell you how they tweak their machine to achieve a certain benchmark score and you wonder why you can't or if the score posted is a fake. But with PS3, everybody playing the same game experience the same thing. That being said, there are too many firmwares (ROMs) to choose from for Android, each offering something different, suited for phones with different hardware. I think this model will be improved once Ice Cream Sandwich comes along where phones with different hardware can share just one firmware.

BACKGROUNDING / MULTITASKING

Android users keep saying that iPhone doesn't do true multitasking, which is somewhat true. But now that Android does full multitasking, everybody complains about battery life and everybody is looking for the "best task killer", which is not supposed to be required for a UNIX kernel. True, iPhone does not do true multiasking. But the iPhone "semi-multitasking" is very well implemented. Whenever you quit an app, the OS stores the last state of the app. So technically it has stopped running. But when you go back, you are at where you left it. This is great for most of the apps like games, readers, etc., where they don't really need to be running in the background. But for Nav apps like Navigon, Tomtom, or even Install0us while downloading an app, these apps do run in the background. With Backgrounder, you can set the behavior of how each app implement multitasking. With Android, every app can run in the background and there is no quick kill button. Although the kernel will kill the app automatically when the memory is low, some apps can misbehave. Try to have Dolphin HD Browser open a page with Flash content and go back to the home screen. The app simply keeps playing the flash content in the background all day long, draining your battery. Thankfully, there's Watchdog Task Manager, which does not blindly kill apps but use CPU threshold to determine what apps are misbehaving. To summarize, with Android, get Watchdog and Wave Launcher, then Multitasking works great. With iPhone, get Backgrounder and use Activate to set up a good gesture to bring up the multitasking bar.

BATTERY / PUSH

All smartphones drain battery fairly quickly, including the iPhone. But Android (SGS2, specifically), drains battery even quicker. On the SGS2, there's this Android OS Bug (Google AOS Bug), which can take off out of nowhere, and drain your battery within half a day without you even touch the phone. But it has been fixed now with Siyahkernal 1.8. But even then, the SGS2 does eat much more battery than an iPhone. One big reason I believe is due to how each phone (or app, actually) manages data. With Android, you have Background Data and Sync to transmit data in the background. But the problem is app developers don't need to follow this API. They can write any app the way they want. Some may keep transmitting data in the background with you knowing unless you use Droidfirewall to block it. With iPhone, we have PUSH notification, which every app follows for transmitting data in the background. I have only now come to really appreciate it. Although for some reason, PUSH email chews a lot more battery out of the iPhone (for Android too) compared to the regular PUSH notification. But the way PUSH is implemented on the iPhone, it IS superior. Android users, due to the battery drainage, have become paranoid about their data toggles. Everything must be toggled off (data/wifi/etc.) when the screen goes off (using Juice Defender or the like). So you are missing out being able to get real-time messages while out and about. With the iPhone, even with PUSH notification on 3G you hardly notice any battery drain when idle and screen off. This is a big plus for Apple. The iPhone has VERY LOW consumption when idle even with PUSH/3G/WIFI all turned on. The SGS2 has a constent ~1.5%/hr drain even when everything is turned off. But of course, if you are on a naked ROM with absolutely no other apps installed, the standby is somewhat better. That's why I think the fact that app developers can program any way they want is not always a good idea. Once you install some apps that do things in the background, your idle battery drain increases.

HARDWARE BUTTONS

Why, Apple, why only one button?? I really like the SGS2 with back and especially the menu buttons. All settings can be accessed in the app instead of going through "settings". Maybe because I'm used to PC's. I still don't like having only one mouse button on a MAC. Having BACK button makes multitasking that much easier. Although the iPhone home button can be assigned different tasks (double click / single click, using Activator), the way SGS2 implements buttons is much better. That being said, I don't like the other variants of Android phones with 4 to 5 buttons. If the function can be consolidated, I'd like that better (i.e. Menu + long pressed = Search).

TV OUT + BLUETOOTH MOUTH/KEYBOARD

If you have a SGS2, you have a fully functional computer in your living room. With the HML cable and bluetooth keyboard/mouse, you can surf the web, watch movies, and do just about everything else on your HDTV. With a BT mouse you can actually have a cursor on your screen (only a BT keyboard works on the iPhone). Although the control is not perfect, but it is certainly usable. Note, the videos (or Youtube videos) are in HD when you watch it on the big screen via SGS2. I am very very impressed. The only downside is that "sometimes" the phone drains the battery instead of getting charged. This goes the same with using SatNav apps while on car charger. The kernel has a 650mA limit on charging while using GPS and a bright screen, the usage might go over 650mA, this might explain why. With Siyahkernel and an inid.d script, you can change the charging limit to 1000mA, but it makes no difference for me. But my theory is that the battery charges slower when the phone temperature is higher in order to protect the battery. Becuase when it's nice and cool, the phone does get charged even when using GPS.

PHONE / MSG APPS

Android comes with a pretty good set of apps by default. The phone app, for instance, I cannot live without being able to search a contact by T9. (i.e. find Richard by typing 7424). With the iPhone, you need to go to Contacts and search by scrolling, which is very inconvenient. But with the jailbroken app iSmartDialer, it solves the issue. The Message app is about the same for both phones. But with the jailbroken app Tlert, or iRealSMS or etc, the experience is even better. You can set up a gesture to bring up the non-intrusive messaging box to type and send. But in general, the Android has a much better notification delivery system through the drop down menu (which has the toggles too). iPhone has SBSettings for the toggles but it doesn't looks as nice. Notification-wise, the iPhone is very intrusive. Without the special SMS jailbroken apps above, when an SMS comes in, you either HAVE TO reply to it, or you have to dismiss it (and possibly forget about it). The Android notification drop down stores all the notifications very nicely.

LOCKSCREEN

iPhone + LockInfo = great. But with Android + JKAY V11, although we don't get notifications right in the lock screen, we can have different ways of launching apps quickly. With Android you can kinda get lockscreen notifications through widgets and WidgetLocker.

BROWSER

Coming from a Nokia N85/N86, the iPhone stock browser is a big upgrade. Although there's no flash support, most sites are formatted quite well on the iPhone. But going from iOS to Android, it is at least 10 times better. Even the stock browser loads pages really fast. When you scroll up and down through a very long page you no longer see the "squares" (where page is not loaded properly). I use both the Dolphin HD for full webpages and Opera Mobile for everyday use. The Opera Mobile is REALLY FAST. And Flash support is just great. You finally get the real desktop browsing experience that you cannot find on an iPhone. I don't like the idea of Apple restricting the way developers write their browsers. Every browser on the AppStore simply runs the default iOS browser as its base and add visual tweaks to it. This is true even for the iPhone version of Skyfire. Back in the Symbian days, the Skyfire is truely revolutionary (for the Nokia phones) where contents are compressed on the server side and streamed to the phone. However, Skyfire is a little too slow waiting either for the webpage or the video. The Android browser is so much so much faster. And tabbed browsing interface is good on both phones.

CAMERA

SGS2 camera beats the crap out of an iPhone 4 camera. It is true that the iPhone 4 can take a pretty decent photo when you are "absolutely still". SGS2 camera is simply better with more options. The night mode actually takes very good pictures even without flash. The iPhone 4, if you move at all during the picture taking, the photo becomes blurred. The iPhone camera is only good under very well lit condition and that you're absolutely still.

SYNCING

With SGS2, you can forget about iTunes. If you have a picture, drag it in because your phone shows up as a USB drive. If you have music, pictures, or whatever, create your own folder, drag them into anywhere you want. The iPhone depends on iTunes too much. Although with PWNTunes you can make the iPhone into a USB drive and drag music in there. But everytime you drag something new in there, the scanning for the new content takes a while. Also, SGS2 is truely integrated with Google services. I keep a copy of my Contacts on the Gmail server and that's all I need. The iPhone with Gmail exchange server set up, it can do the same, but the battery drain does apply for the iPhone (i.e. battery drain with exchange email described previously).

MULTIMEDIA

SGS2 can play all kinds of file formats, which pretty much eliminates the need for a computer. The iPhone requires VLC player or alike. It does work, but for one, you cannot organize your files by folders.

VOIP

SGS2 has a fairly sufficient VOIP client built in. And you can get a modded phone app to do call recording. This is not as easy on the iPhone. I use Acrobits as my VOIP client on the iPhone and I can only do call recording on VOIP calls but not regular GSM calls. The VOIP incoming calls rely on PUSH notification, which is a bit inconvenient because once you get the notification, you have to consider the delay of opening the respective VOIP app to properly receive the call. By the time everything is opened, the caller might've given up. On Android, the client itself is constantly listening for incoming calls at the cost of battery. But it does responds like the regular calls.

GPS

The actual GPS performance when a signal is locked is pretty much identical for both phones practically. However, when you depend on AGPS for a triangulation, the iPhone works much faster and accurately. For instance, the Camera geotagging works more reliably with the iPhone because it will record your location nearest to the cell tower you are connected to. But with Android, many apps apparently do not use this information and try to wait for a full GPS signal. The result is, if you take a picture, the location recorded can be way off.

ACCESSORIES

When I went to Best Buy / Future Shop to find a car holder for my beloved SGS2, I was totally pissed by the fact that every (+95%) accessories in the store are for the iPhone!!?? Ebay is probably the only other good place to look for accessories. The good thing is that the iPhone headphone with mic and control does work on the SGS2. Note the microphone jack pins changed from the Galaxy S to the S2. S2 follows the iPhone (i.e. headphone works, mic works, call button works, but not the volume buttons). For the Galaxy S, two of the pins are reversed like the Nokia phones. So I'm glad that SGS2 is more "future-proof" in this regard. At least it accepts iPhone headphones (which is the trend??)

WARRANTY

I haven't had to deal with this yet for my SGS2. But when my iPhone broke the last time (home button stopped working), I just unjailbreak it (new flash) and took it to the nearest Apple Store (not the one I bought the phone from), and a brand new iPhone was given to me no questions asked (they only checked for any sign of water damage by looking at the special stickers in the headphone jack and charger port). But I am pretty sure the Samsund warranty cannot be as good as the Apple warranty. For one, I got the international version from Expansys.ca. So if it breaks, I guess I would need to buy a new one.

SELLING THE PHONE

The iPhone retains its value very very well. My iPhone 4, I bought at about $6xx, I sold for $540 after one year. My iPhone 3GS, which I bought locked, I sold it much higher than my buying price. I think the SGS2 is more like a car, once you drive it, the price is at least halved.

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I'm so tired of typing, I'll type some more some other time. Feel free to ask me questions though.