iPhone user to Android User, my thoughts after a week

[Beer4Me]

I just ordered a Samsung Galaxy S2 for AT&T from AmazonWireless for $150 shipped w/ 2yr renewal.

I'm disappointed by the iPhone 4S launch (been an iPhone user/owner since the 3G), and the S2 already matches it in hardware (exception of the Apple A5 SoC, which I don't care about).

I'm really excited as this will be my first 'Droid device, having been stuck on iOS 4ever, and I'm ready to jump ship. I would've went to WP7.5, but the hardware is still behind, and so is the App Market. I really do like the look/polish of WP7 O/S however, so I hope it succeeds.

I'll add my 0.02 once this phone shows up.

BTW, I'll have a gently used iPhone 3GS 16 GB White iPhone for sell soon.

 

[mosco]

Switched to RSSDemon for Podcasts. A better UI, but it doesn't seem to dump the podcasts into the music folder for android, so the podcasts don't show up in the Music app (running the leaked Music 4.0.1 app).

Are there themes that can change OOTB elements? One thing I am not a fan of is how everything uses black and gray. Like the background color of the preferences, and a lot of apps user black as a background.

Are there free solutions for the following:
1) Add a timeout before it forces the lock pin code entry. So if I turn off the screen, and then open it a minute later, it won't ask me for the pin code again.

2) Have it auto unlock after I type the pin, instead of having to press ok. (I know some ROMS can do this)

So far I don't think there is anything that is keeping me from going back to the iphone. Battery life just hasn't been there for me, even using Juice Defender and some Roms (Fasty for the captivate) that claim to provide better battery life.

I went to the verizon store yesterday and don't like the feeling of any of the >4 inch screen devices. I like being able to touch any part of the screen with my thumb using one hand.

I am still somewhat disappointed that the 4S doesn't have a 4 inch screen, but I am willing to give it up for better battery life and a smaller form factor.

 

[QuantumPion]

I bought an AT&T SGS2 last week. Yesterday I just returned it, preordered an iphone 4s (previous phone was iphone 3gs). The SGS2 screen was awesome, but the battery life was atrocious (less than 1 hour screen time on wifi) and the android OS is just obnoxiously bad. E.g. - bundled music player doesn't read meta info at all, corrupts album sorting. Can't play podcasts at all. Have to pay $8 for working music app. I did really like the Swype keyboard though.

 

[Ns1]

I bought an AT&T SGS2 last week. Yesterday I just returned it, preordered an iphone 4s (previous phone was iphone 3gs). The SGS2 screen was awesome, but the battery life was atrocious (less than 1 hour screen time on wifi) and the android OS is just obnoxiously bad. E.g. - bundled music player doesn't read meta info at all, corrupts album sorting. Can't play podcasts at all. Have to pay $8 for working music app. I did really like the Swype keyboard though.

Can you provide any additional information regarding your experience?

I currently have a 3gs and I'm still up in the air. I can't even find an ATT store with the SGS2.

 

[Red Storm]

I bought an AT&T SGS2 last week. Yesterday I just returned it, preordered an iphone 4s (previous phone was iphone 3gs). The SGS2 screen was awesome, but the battery life was atrocious (less than 1 hour screen time on wifi) and the android OS is just obnoxiously bad. E.g. - bundled music player doesn't read meta info at all, corrupts album sorting. Can't play podcasts at all. Have to pay $8 for working music app. I did really like the Swype keyboard though.

1 hour from full charge to dead? Sounds like a bad battery...

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Are there themes that can change OOTB elements? One thing I am not a fan of is how everything uses black and gray. Like the background color of the preferences, and a lot of apps user black as a background.

The UI on the Captivate is primarily black because AMOLED screens use no power displaying it, in contrast white has the highest power usage of anything displayed by the screen.

There should be themes on XDA developers that you can flash for most of the popular captivate roms.

if you hate how most things on Android look have you considered trying MIUI? It is a custom rom that looks a lot like iOS.

 

[mosco]

The UI on the Captivate is primarily black because AMOLED screens use no power displaying it, in contrast white has the highest power usage of anything displayed by the screen.

There should be themes on XDA developers that you can flash for most of the popular captivate roms.

if you hate how most things on Android look have you considered trying MIUI? It is a custom rom that looks a lot like iOS.

I have a theme for the launcher that is nice and bright, but its more within apps. The music app is black, the preferences are black, the RSS reader is black. But I guess your explanation makes sense.

In terms of MiUI, I have considered it, but it sounds like the battery life isn't that great atleast from what I could gather on XDA. I guess its worth a shot.

 

[QuantumPion]

1 hour from full charge to dead? Sounds like a bad battery...

I don't see how the battery could be bad in the way that you suggest. I think the problem was poor cell signal inside my house. When I used the phone at work, with 5 bars, the battery level was decent (maybe around half that of my iphone 3gs). But at home, with 1 bar, I went from 100% to low battery (~25% I think) after about 1 hour of active usage.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

For every single bad battery complaint, can people look at the battery usage section of their phone? If you're on Gingerbread, it will tell you how much % each app uses.

1 hour is impossible. Even bad signal you might lose 20% or something at most. I've forgotten to turn off Airplane mode a lot of times at work and I work in an underground facility with zero reception. Reception definitely hits battery a lot, but 1 hour lifespan means some rogue app was probably taking 100% of your CPU cycles.

 

[QuantumPion]

Can you provide any additional information regarding your experience?

I currently have a 3gs and I'm still up in the air. I can't even find an ATT store with the SGS2.

If you like to manage your music library on your phone, listen to podcasts, and have access to a wide array of apps, stick with the iphone. If buggy software doesn't bother you, the SGS2 may be better.

SGS2 vs 3gs:

+The screen on the SGS2 was awesome. You just have to see it in person.

+I definitely preferred the Swype keyboard over the iphone keyboard. Way easier to quickly send messages without errors and fun too. If you don't know what swype is, it's basically a qwerty keyboard that you swoosh your finger between the letters without releasing and the software guesses what word you were trying to type based on the letters you pass over. In my short experience it worked 95% of the time and was way less error prone than iphone's error correction.

+It was much easier to browse the web, as not only the screen is larger but the browser runs full screen without interface bars at the top and bottom.

+push email for gmail. minor convenience over iphone fetching.

~SGS2 is even lighter and thinner than the iphone4. It's substantially lighter than the 3gs. At first this seemed like a pro but honestly I think I like the sturdier feeling iphone. I feel like I'm more prone to drop the SGS2, due to its lighter weight but bigger surface area.

-android app store is surprisingly sparse compared to apple store. Not a big selection. A pro to this though is that many paid apps are free-with-ads. A negative though is that apps that do cost money are often $5 or more.

--volume control. the SGS2 volume control is schizophrenic and a pain to manage. The silent mode doesn't really silent anything. If you bump a volume button then you are no longer in silent mode any more. Furthermore - and this is hugely lame - the silent mode doesn't silent "media", e.g. music or apps. Only alerts and rings. So even if the phone is in silent mode, if you start up an app it will blare out at whatever the previous volume level was out of the speaker. There's no way to reduce the volume or even know what it is at any time before the sound comes out - apparently you can only change the media volume while something is playing. And it doesn't differentiate volume modes whether headphones are plugged in or not. That is, unless you pay ~$8 for a third party volume control app.

--default music player worthless. If you have itunes-managed music library, it won't work at all with the default music player. It will confuse genre and album tags, causing everything to be mixed up. Only way to fix it is to buy a third party app for ~$8. Also, if you listen to podcasts, you'll need to buy an additional separate $8 app to get any sort of functionality in that regard.

--screen gets hot. I guess this is why Samsung has not brought out a full-sized computer monitor OLED yet - heat. This thing cooks in your hand and will automatically limit max brightness to half after about 2 minutes.

 

[QuantumPion]

For every single bad battery complaint, can people look at the battery usage section of their phone? If you're on Gingerbread, it will tell you how much % each app uses.

1 hour is impossible. Even bad signal you might lose 20% or something at most. I've forgotten to turn off Airplane mode a lot of times at work and I work in an underground facility with zero reception. Reception definitely hits battery a lot, but 1 hour lifespan means some rogue app was probably taking 100% of your CPU cycles.

My meter was dominated 90% by either android OS (if it had been on standby) or display (while in use). There were no rogue apps hogging power. It was the first thing I checked.

 

[Beer4Me]

So I sold my 3GS for $250 on Craigslist today.
BTW, all of the SGS2 phones are sold out and backordered at 4 AT&T stores in my area. I ended up just going to Best Buy and picking one up. Apparently, BB has plenty of them. I guess a lot of ppl don't think about BB when it comes to mobile phones, I know I didn't (at first).

First impressions of the phone/OS:
Screen size, brightness, color, clarity is amazing! HSPDA+ is very fast, faster than 3G on my old 3GS. Latency and downloading is much faster.
Android 2.3.4 is much improved over Froyo (comparing to my g/f's Galaxy S).
The phone is extremely responsive. The 1 GB of memory helps I'm sure. I've not had to reboot/powercycle the phone since Day 1.
Only complaint, battery life seems to be a couple hours less than my 3GS. My 3GS had a new battery which I installed, the batt that came with it was dying at 40% life.
Camera/LED quality is tops. Turning on the camera to taking a pic, takes about 2 seconds at most. It's almost superfluous.
No lag in the UI at all, everything is "glass".
Can't wait for the next Android O/S update!

So far, very impressed. Loving my SGS2. Glad I dumped my IPhone. Was tired of Itunes (bloatware), and the lack of customization (not going to jailbreak). Also, each iOS release slowed down my phone even more.

 

[Ns1]

QuantumPion- thanks for your thoughts.

 

[zinfamous]

I bought an AT&T SGS2 last week. Yesterday I just returned it, preordered an iphone 4s (previous phone was iphone 3gs). The SGS2 screen was awesome, but the battery life was atrocious (less than 1 hour screen time on wifi) and the android OS is just obnoxiously bad. E.g. - bundled music player doesn't read meta info at all, corrupts album sorting. Can't play podcasts at all. Have to pay $8 for working music app. I did really like the Swype keyboard though.

with constant use and on WiFi, I'm getting at least 4 hours of battery on my SGS2.

your issue sounds quite odd.

 

[evident]

with constant use and on WiFi, I'm getting at least 4 hours of battery on my SGS2.

your issue sounds quite odd.

what rom you using? I'm getting about 16+ hours of battery life with heavy use. no movies or youtube, but just surfing chatting on IM and playing games here and there. i'm using the latest XXKI3 load on xdadevelopers. Its a stock official euro rom, even though my version is from south america, UHKG4 i think.

 

[zinfamous]

what rom you using? I'm getting about 16+ hours of battery life with heavy use. no movies or youtube, but just surfing chatting on IM and playing games here and there. i'm using the latest XXKI3 load on xdadevelopers. Its a stock official euro rom, even though my version is from south america, UHKG4 i think.

well, I say at least, because that is as much time as I've spent on the phone, constantly. After work, int he evening. It spends most of the day sleeping at work (not scanning for anything), but it does drain pretty quickly once I start searching the markt heavy and start fiddling with widgets.

It's all stock right now, until I get around to fiddling with roms--I did update the firmware last night, following lothar's tips, and will begin the root process soon, i think... that's the same version i have, actually--UHKl2, anyway--after updating firmware)

the only semi-battery tool that I have is advanced task killer light...but I don't think it's really doing anything.

It is annoying to see apps constantly turning themselves on after you turn them off--especially the ones that have no good reason to be running constantly

 

[Puddle Jumper]

well, I say at least, because that is as much time as I've spent on the phone, constantly. After work, int he evening. It spends most of the day sleeping at work (not scanning for anything), but it does drain pretty quickly once I start searching the markt heavy and start fiddling with widgets.

It's all stock right now, until I get around to fiddling with roms--I did update the firmware last night, following lothar's tips, and will begin the root process soon, i think... that's the same version i have, actually--UHKl2, anyway--after updating firmware)

the only semi-battery tool that I have is advanced task killer light...but I don't think it's really doing anything.

It is annoying to see apps constantly turning themselves on after you turn them off--especially the ones that have no good reason to be running constantly

The task killer is probably hurting you battery life. As odd as it may seem it is generally best to just let Android manage what is and isn't running

 

[QuantumPion]

with constant use and on WiFi, I'm getting at least 4 hours of battery on my SGS2.

your issue sounds quite odd.

It was clear the battery drain was related to cell signal. I could see two distinct slopes on the graph which correlated directly to signal strength. Maybe the phone was constantly losing its signal and reconnecting, causing a constant drain. I have no idea.

Anyway, even with a good signal, the battery life was short enough that I wasn't able to use my phone all day without charging it, unlike my iphone which usually has ~30% left when I get home from work.

 

[Anubis]

you should be getting much more out of your battery

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/18

 

[lothar]

well, I say at least, because that is as much time as I've spent on the phone, constantly. After work, int he evening. It spends most of the day sleeping at work (not scanning for anything), but it does drain pretty quickly once I start searching the markt heavy and start fiddling with widgets.

It's all stock right now, until I get around to fiddling with roms--I did update the firmware last night, following lothar's tips, and will begin the root process soon, i think... that's the same version i have, actually--UHKl2, anyway--after updating firmware)

the only semi-battery tool that I have is advanced task killer light...but I don't think it's really doing anything.

It is annoying to see apps constantly turning themselves on after you turn them off--especially the ones that have no good reason to be running constantly

Use the built in task killer in Android.
I installed Yahoo Messenger and I kept on using ZDbox's task killer to kill it...Only I will see it back up running again after a few minutes.
Go to settings>>>Applications>>>Running Services and kill them there.

I have LBE Privacy Guard installed and it's always funny to see Yahoo Messenger trying to access my contacts every hour.

 

[lothar]

For every single bad battery complaint, can people look at the battery usage section of their phone? If you're on Gingerbread, it will tell you how much % each app uses.

1 hour is impossible. Even bad signal you might lose 20% or something at most. I've forgotten to turn off Airplane mode a lot of times at work and I work in an underground facility with zero reception. Reception definitely hits battery a lot, but 1 hour lifespan means some rogue app was probably taking 100% of your CPU cycles.

Yeah...I call shens on his story.

you should be getting much more out of your battery

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4686/samsung-galaxy-s-2-international-review-the-best-redefined/18

1 hour is nowhere near 7.5 hours.

 

[zinfamous]

The task killer is probably hurting you battery life. As odd as it may seem it is generally best to just let Android manage what is and isn't running

probably. I had it set to manual for the first two weeks, and would do press the buttons on my own, when I was using the phone. I recently set it to kill every hour or so, and battery seems to drain faster.

Eh, it was one of the first apps I installed, based on reviews and bumming around the markets for several hours. I'm still finding my way around this thing.

Also, running a live wallpaper probably doesn't help. :hmm:

 

[WelshBloke]

Launcher pro is another good option.

UberMusic is supposed to be a good option for music players but I have not tried it myself.

Launcher pro and beautiful widgets for your home screens.

Pure messenger for a fantastic email/sms/facebook/Twitter aggregator widget (you may have to do some dicking around to get gmail working but its worth it).

Ubermusic for a music player with lots of eyecandy (I love it but I'm not a massive user of music on my device so it may not have some of the more esoteric options that people demand).

Oh and install an AOSP Rom if you can.

 

[bearxor]

I just wanted to throw my .02 in here.

As a 5-year Windows Mobile user that switched to iPhone in 2008, everything I hear about Android is just reminiscent of those dark, dark WinMo days. It's all 'load this custom ROM and if you don't like that, then just keep trying different ones until you find one that is the balance of speed and stability you need!'

No thank you. When I first started using WinMo phones I thought it was fun but eventually I just wanted something that worked, which is why I stuck with my Treo 700wx so long. My blanket ban on HTC devices comes from the WinMo days. HTC was always good at hardware, but terrible, terrible software coding.

But, to fast forward to more recent times, every time I use a Android device it just doesn't FEEL right. There's just something off. It's not as elegant. Not as fluid. It's hard to even explain in words. It's just so... off-putting. The thing is, I yearn for something different. I've been looking at the same screen of 4x4 icons for the last three years and I WANT something different.

If today were 2008 and there were Android and WP7 devices around then too, I don't know which direction I might have gone. Probably WP7. I reexamine my iOS loyalty every time I go to buy a new phone. I've decided to upgrade to a 4S when my eligibility hits in December. I want to go another direction, but neither alternate platform offers enough to make me walk away from 3 years of the App Store ecosystem. Maybe next year...

 

[Red Storm]

--volume control. the SGS2 volume control is schizophrenic and a pain to manage. The silent mode doesn't really silent anything. If you bump a volume button then you are no longer in silent mode any more. Furthermore - and this is hugely lame - the silent mode doesn't silent "media", e.g. music or apps. Only alerts and rings. So even if the phone is in silent mode, if you start up an app it will blare out at whatever the previous volume level was out of the speaker. There's no way to reduce the volume or even know what it is at any time before the sound comes out - apparently you can only change the media volume while something is playing. And it doesn't differentiate volume modes whether headphones are plugged in or not. That is, unless you pay ~$8 for a third party volume control app.

On my Droid I have an option in my sound settings that let's me decide if I do or don't want the media volume to be muted whenever I put the phone on vibrate/silent. Might want to check there?

It was clear the battery drain was related to cell signal. I could see two distinct slopes on the graph which correlated directly to signal strength. Maybe the phone was constantly losing its signal and reconnecting, causing a constant drain. I have no idea.

You said it was on wifi though, so no data would be using the poor cell signal. Even in a worse case scenario, 1 hour battery life tells you that something else is up.