iPhone OS 4 – My thoughts

As many of you I can’t move more than 10 feet away from my iPhone and when I don’t see it for more than 1/2 hour I start sweating and get some kind of rash. No, it’s not that bad. But I do like my iPhone. It is great productivity tool and excellent tool for reading news, staying in touch with your friends etc. Wherever you are – doctor’s office, bus, washroom …

I recently upgraded to latest OS version 4. People warned me but I just like fresh crispy releases at no matter what the cost is. So far I don’t regret it. Here are some of the reasons why I like it so far.

Email
No more jumping between 7 mailboxes. All mail is now nicely consolidated in one mailbox called ‘All Inboxes’. Sweet.However opening email is slower. I am not sure it if is because of overall ‘being slower’ or because of added features.

speed
It is slower. Loading applications, getting email. Overall, it is slower. Sometime after I slide little button to open it up and enter the pass code it takes close to a minute until I am able to enter the pass code.

ADP2 vs. iPhone

I got my shiny new ADP2 from Google week ago. As I said before, I planned to do some mobile development and originally considered iPhone. However the idea of learning Cocoa didn’t really materialize. Android allows you to build mobile apps in Java. The API is nice and clean and easy to use. Saying that I don’t want to say one is better than the other. I never build a single iPhone app (except some Hello World apps). I was playing with Android development for last week and I have to say – it rocks!

Opening the box – first steps

It is really nice and slick phone. It is a little bit smaller, a little bit thicker and a little bit lighter than iPhone (or at least it feels like). I am not going to write about specifications here. You can find those on other sites. The box contained mini-USB cable, charger, headphones, battery and the phone itself. Yes – user replaceable battery. It’s a must because you have to take out battery to replace the SIM card. Taking back cover off is simple operation and it holds nice once you put it back on.

Turn it on!

The phone turns on by pressing end-call button and holding it for 2 seconds. Phone boots pretty fast. It takes about the same time as iPhone. Not a big difference here.

Ear-phones

It’s sad that earphones use mini-USB and not regular jack. A lot of people complained about that and I have to agree. Overall headphones are sort of cheap-looking but work fine. You can control volume and answer phone calls. It is bulky and as I said has a cheaper feel. Ear phone are very subjective. It also depends on the shape of your ear. iPhone ear phones were alway falling out of my ears and forget about jogging with them.

Touch Display

Display is 1/8″ smaller than iPhone display. Size matters. I was reading somewhere that this slight difference makes iPhone’s touch display better. It is better, I don’t know why, but it is. I’ve experienced less typos with iPhone and I always liked tapping space twice that resulted in dot. I miss it now. But you can easily download ‘better keyboards’ that can replace stock keyboard. Didn’t try any of them so I can’t comment on it.

Browsing

Android browser is based on WebKit. Browsing is fast no difference from  Safari. Page refresh, going to different page requires pressing menu button and then typing in the url or pressing refresh button. I like trackball. Makes it easy to navigate through all links. First I didn’t like the idea of trackball but I eventually warmed up. Maybe also to compensate for touch display which is not as good as iPhone’s.

To be continued …