Ditching IPhone for Android

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GigaOm via Businessweek has a piece by Matthew Ingram and his decision process in (probably) moving to Android from an iPhone. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been somewhat having the same thought process here. Android with Jelly Bean has become a very powerful platform and the more I’ve played and used it regularly (over the past few years) the more I like it. Up until recently though I’ve still largely leaned on the iPhone for a lot of things but I’ve begun to reach the conclusion that’s largely unnecessary. Here’s a quick look at my daily usage …

Core Apps:

  • Gmail / Email for both personal and work accounts. Yes it’s silly there are two apps and even sillier that they work a bit differently but this is not a critical issue for me.
  • Chromea bit of a no-brainer perhaps, but it’s rather awesome on Android.  Everything (almost) syncs.  I can’t seem to get my passwords to load, but tabs and history are all there across every screen I use.
  • Reader HD – I love this application and it’s become my workhorse for Google Reader consumption.
  • Pocket – I’ve used the competing read it later services and really just love Pocket.  I’ve even recently installed this on my Mac so I’ve got the full loop.  The Chrome extension is a key part of the equation.
  • Everything else I need or want to use is also there … Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Flickr (better on iPhone actually), Flipboard, SoundCloud, Spotify, Snapseed, Dropbox etc etc … all good.

 

The main place iOS still wins is in depth of games, but even that particularly on the more casual side, things are changing very rapidly in favor of Android users.

 

I think I might have felt that battery life was better on iPhone in the past, but my iPhone 4S eats battery just lying around and when I use it things drain just as aggressively.  On the Galaxy Note, before I changed the ROM, the battery was amazingly solid.  Given my choice to run an early beta of CM10, I’m sacrificing some time.  I might actually go back just to get the battery life back.

The things I really love about Android though are how you can move between applications in a fluid and frictionless way.  On iPhone you can only move content or share with the things the developer or sometimes Apple has selected for you.  On Android, you can share to quite a few applications at any given time.  This means I can quickly save content to Pocket from everywhere, blog something from just about everywhere and share a picture or link to any service I want.

I’m in control and I like it that way.

I need to maintain access to iOS for work purposes, but I could definitely be very comfortable without my iPhone in my pocket at this point.