This is a historic day for me: I switched from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running “Ice Cream Sandwich.” (Love the Google practice of naming versions of the operating system after desserts; M should be “malasadas.”) My Google buddy, sent me one to try, and it’s a lovely phone.
1) The operating system is smokin’ fast—and intuitive. So this phone represents the geek’s trifecta: fast, good, and cheap (free).
2) I love the little haptic “jolts” that happen when you press buttons on the screen because you really know that you pressed the button.
3) Email setup was trivially easy. And then my contacts and calendar get added to the phone. Sure, this is how Exchange is supposed to work, but I’ve never had to not do battle with a phone to make this happen.
4) There’s a G+ app on the phone, and it works just great. And you all know that G+ is just about the center of my life these days, so this is big deal for me.
5) I notice the strip of thumbnails (see picture) when I wrote a G+ message. What’s this I wonder? It’s the pictures that I took with the phone. Does this mean that phone pictures are available for me to post on Google + without any manual syncing, downloading, emailing?
Holy kaw!
I know that I can post pictures using the G+ iPhone app but composing the text that goes with the picture is too much trouble on any phone, so I was either downloading pictures from my iPhone to my Macbook or emailing the pictures to myself to post.
6) The Galaxy can use the 4G network, and the iPhone cannot. That’s kind of a big deal.
7) The Galaxy is rated at 400 hours of standby battery life. My iPhone 4S is rated at 200 hours of standby, but I get about six hours of standby time. We’ll see what happens in real use.
8) The Galaxy runs Flash. The pissing match between Apple and Adobe is not my problem anyway.
9) Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’m thinking that the Android version of a Google app will be better and earlier than the iOS version. Love Google Currents by the way—mdash;you should check it out.
All this happened before I made one call with the phone. I couldn’t make a call because the iPhone uses a micro sim, and the Galaxy uses a sim. So I went to the AT&T store across the street from the Apple store and got a new sim with the old phone number.
Things that I don’t like:
1) I wish there was a dedicated hardware button to go “home” like the iPhone has.
2) Dragging down a window to refresh it is a much better way to do this than the way Galaxy forces you to find the refresh menu item.
One thing I will miss: Nobody’s tech support can be as good as the Apple stores in Palo Alto on University Avenue and in the Stanford Shopping Center. But there are still three other iPhones, three iPads, and five Macintoshes in my family.
I’ll let you know if the honeymoon ends…