Android Survival Guide for iPhone Users
So I recently purchased an Android phone, the Samsung Captivate, which is the US AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S, and I’ve discovered that switching has been difficult. Aside from the obvious learning curve of going from one system to another, there’s been quite a few issues that have been incredibly aggravating and have left me wondering if I can make it to 30 days, let alone past 30 days, without getting a refund and getting an iPhone 4 instead. However, I’m still persisting for the time being, and while I’m suffering, I figured I’d address what issues I’ve been able to solve, but to also air some others and see if you folks have any ideas. Who knows, maybe there’ll be a good idea in this somewhere.
I’ll likely have to come back to this post at another time to clean it up and make it more readable, but for now, I’m just going to start listing issues and, if I’ve found them, solutions. Without further ado, let’s make Android more tolerable for those of us who are spoiled by the kings of interface at Cupertino.
Just to be clear, some of these issues may be specific to the Samsung Captivate, so if your manufacturer uses better apps, these things may not be helpful to you. Also, this applies to Android 2.1, so if you’re fortunate enough to be running 2.2 and some of things these are fixed, well then good for you. For the rest of us stuck on 2.1, let’s look at fixes.
1) Android’s default SMS client doesn’t display text messages longer than “standard” 160 character size in-line.
Solution: You have two choices, but only one is free. ChompSMS and Handcent SMS both display long texts.
This may be a minor thing, but let’s face it, when you’re friends (or family) with a bunch of smartphone users, you’re bound to get a text longer than the antiquated twitter-like character limit. Unfortunately, Android’s built-in SMS client gives you a “Read more” link at the end of long messages and opens said messages in a new window, which is really annoying and unnecessary, especially given that the iPhone has handled these much more eloquently for three years already.
ChompSMS, as I mentioned above, is capable of handling the messages and does so in an iPhone-like bubble style, which seems to aggravate native Android users. Handcent has a more IM like display, complete with a thumbnail of your contact attached to each message from them. ChompSMS is ad-supported with a “donate to remove ads” option.
Handcent is pretty much the same thing (I can already see the hate mail), but a little more configurable and much, much faster. There’s a lag to ChompSMS that’s annoying and that isn’t present in Handcent. Handcent also only looks to have ads when you’re in the settings, so while it’s basically free, even its ads are unassuming. Nice!
Price: ChompSMS: Free-$3.75; Handcent SMS: free.
2) No visual voicemail.
This is actually an easy fix as there are apps readily able to mimic what Apple did for voicemail with the iPhone, but seeing as this is a Google phone, give Google Voice a try.
If you’re not familiar with Google Voice, do yourself a favor and click that link and read up. If you’re familiar with it but didn’t know that you could tightly integrate it into Android, now you do. Simply log into your account, make sure to link your Android phone with it, and then go into the voicemail settings and follow the instructions to use it as the voicemail service for your Android phone. As a bonus, you’ll get the wonderfully awful (and awesome) text transcriptions of any and all voicemail messages you receive via Google Voice. Pure entertainment, those transcriptions.
Price: free. As a bonus, make cheap international calls via Google Voice or use the number to screen your phone calls.
3) Getting podcasts (especially video ones) is a pain in the butt.
Ok, sure you could sync your phone to your computer, but for us Mac users, that’s not really an option (unless you want to use Windows, natively or virtually, on your Mac). However, if you only listen to certain podcasts, then an RSS client can do wonders, which brings us to dPod.
Yes, there are a variety of podcatchers out there that offer a lot more features, have prettier interfaces, and frankly, do a whole hell of a lot more than I care about. What makes dPod so great is that it’s very barebones, and the way it downloads podcasts is the way they all should: it dumps them right into memory where the video player instantly recognizes them as playable media. How simple is that? As a bonus, you can also tell it to only download via wifi to save data. (Here’s a hint, there’s one called something like .Podcaster. that fails miserably at this, never mind that it’s slow and filled with obtrusive ads.)
If you’re not familiar with adding RSS feeds to a client, it’s really simple. Just go to your favorite podcast’s website (twit.tv for instance) and look up the podcast: it’ll have an RSS feed (if they’re smart) and it’ll either be immediately obvious what the URL is for that feed, or else you can view the source code for that page to find out the URL of the feed via the link. Easy as pie.
Price: free.
Bonus podcatcher: Google Listen. Really awesome, and free, but only for audio podcasts (unless I haven’t figured out how to make it work for video podcasts yet. I need to experiment more).
4) Android email sucks (ok, the Gmail client is cool, but Samsung’s email client is terrible).
Even if you do like the Gmail client, you may be interested in checking out k9mail. If you’re a power user, this is the client for you. It supports multiple accounts, has a combined inbox, supports push (Gmail and MobileMe push just fine, Yahoo not so much, but that could be because it’s a free Yahoo account), is configureable for often it polls (for the non-push servers), and does a whole hell of a lot more. Seriously, there’s a lot of options, but it’s also quite useable for the person who doesn’t know or care about all of those settings.
Having said that, the UI is pretty sparse, so it may or may not be for you. Still, it’s powerful.
Price: free.
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Random bitching about things that are just nowhere near as cool.
1) No zoom-to-cursor.
Do you like how when you hold your finger in a text entry box on the iPhone it zooms in and makes it really, really easy to get the cursor exactly where you want it? Android doesn’t do that.
2) Crappy media players.
Do you like how the iPhone, when you’re listening to a live album, it goes from track to track seamlessly (to all but the audiophile snobs)? Android doesn’t do that. Android also seems to forget you have a remote on your headphones.
Do you like how the iPhone always remembers where you’re at when you’re watching a video and that you can even close the player, do something else, come back to it and restart it and it’s right where you left off? Android does do that, so long as you don’t use the remote. Really.
Yes, the good thing about Android is that there’s a lot of media players in the marketplace, but I don’t want to pay for something that should be out-of-the-box functionality, and I don’t want to use an app that’s so filled with features that it’s slow as molasses because it links to all sorts of things I don’t care about, like Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, and a million other social things.
I’ve tried quite a few thus far, and sadly, I’ve stuck with the default ones which are really quite bad. A shame.
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So there you have it. Have some more suggestions? Found a better app than the one I suggested, then by all means post away and give others a little peace of mind. I’ll continue to update this as I stumble across various fixes/better options, but until then, if you’re in the same boat as me — switching from an iPhone to Android — then good luck! At the very least, the notification system is awesome! Take that, Apple!
May I use your website as a resource in my paper? Thank you!