My iPhone to Android Review

My Move from iPhone to Android

First of all, let me tell you that I was a hardcore iPhone user prior to the month of October 2009. Also, this post is not biased in anyway at all. I really just felt that people should know the differences between an iPhone and Android phone, coming from an iPhone fanboy. I think this would also help people understand why I switched, if you even care. Again, let me start off by saying, I was a hardcore iPhone fanboy. I got the first generation iPhone when it came out and moved on to the iPhone 3G last year. I can say that in my time of having an iPhone, it was the best phone I had at the time. Of course the Smartphone landscape has much changed since then. Having known about the Android OS and the new phones coming out, I decided to do some research and see what else was out there. Mind you, I have been with ATT for about 7 years or so. And the last 2 years with an iPhone, the service has been okay. Not the best, but then again not the worst either. I ran into the usual issues with AT&T – spotty 3g service and dropped calls. I probably had 2-3 dropped calls daily and my 3g would switch from edge and 3g back.

After a full month of research on Android, I decided it was time to switch providers and move on. I did some research and noticed Sprint was launching the HTC Hero in October. I saw articles and videos of this phone a few months back and was immediately hooked. Long story short, October came around and I ended up switching to Sprint. I actually got out of my AT&T contract early to switch. If you don’t know, AT&T’s early termination fees are reduced each month by $5. So I only had to pay $100 to leave AT&T, which is not bad.

As I further looked into Sprint and their service, I heard a lot of negative reviews on their service. I can tell you that my experience the past month has been very positive. I’m not sure why I heard bad things about Sprint and their service. Since I was a new customer with Sprint, I signed up for their Employee Referral discount. (New subscribers, please contact me for more info on getting this particular rate plan). I am basically getting the $69.99/450 minute plan for $59.99 and it includes an extra 50 minutes, along with the following: Any Network Any Mobile unlimited and unlimited data/text/email/etc. You definitely cannot beat that. This is by far the best voice and data plan on the market right now. In my 1 month or so of usage, I have seen 3G speeds between 700kbs to 1.7Mbs. The 3G speeds are blazing fast, much faster than AT&T ever was.I am almost always on 3G data and very rarely on their Edge 1x counterpart. The voice quality on the Hero is amazingly clear. I am definitely not missing the iPhone’s voice quality. The iPhone felt as if your ears were plugged, which made it not so easy to hear the other party.

Now on to the iPhone and Android OS comparison. The iPhone is a really nifty phone. It's by far the easiest phone to use. Apple really made it easy for non tech users to pick up a phone, make calls and check emails. It doesn't get any easier than that. Now, having owned the iPhone for some time, I decided it would be cool to jailbreak. I did this and it was a night and day comparison to a non-jailbroken iPhone. The ability to change out my themes and install non-Apple approved applications, was great. You could practically change out everything from fonts, sms bubbles, themes and more. This was all fun and games, but after owning the HTC Hero for well over a month, a lot of this was already available out of the box – without hacking! For me, the best part of the HTC Hero and any Android phone is the notification tray and the Social networking features. The notification tray really sold me on the whole Android OS. I really like how everything from missed calls, texts, ims and emails show up in the notification tray. This is something that is really important to me and should have been on the iPhone from day one. Also, the ability to connect with all your contacts on Facebook and see their updates as they come in - really cool! Also, the physical buttons are really helpful too. Much better than the iPhone’s single home button. All Android phones have independent settings for each and every app you are in. To get into the settings, you just have to push the menu button and then hit settings. It's as simple as that!

I think that pretty much sums it up. I’ll be looking forward to seeing more Android phones in the next year.

Stay tuned for more Android related posts. If you want to know about anything else regarding Android, let me know and I'd be happy to write about it.