Over the past 3 months I've had 4 different personal phones: An iPhone 3G I loved for over 2 years, 2 Android phones: a Motorola Milestone (a close cousin to the Droid), an HTC Desire and finally a WP7 LG Optimus 7.
Transition from iPhone to Android
Initially this is shocking. Android is rough; however, everything you need from a smartphone is there. And there are some silver linings. The biggest bonus of the transition is if you are a Gmail user and your contacts are stored in Gmail. Alternatively, if you didn't use Gmail, you do now, sorry. There is no more silly google sync desktop synchronization with iTunes hocus pocus, its all done on the phone. Gmail account integration is possibly one of the biggest features that the boxy Motorola gave me, and it made me smile. Other features slowly but surely let me look past the initial dis-uniformity of the user interface and experience. features such as: Mobile wireless hotspots, google navigation (seriously good, it's replaced my Tom Tom), and the Gmail client.
Biggest blessing and curse: touch and hold menus; these are stellar, but they also prevent you from advancing or moving your cursor when you are editing an email or a body of text, and in the case of the milestone, it was a horrible square D pad that you need to slide out from time to time to move your cursor. This is far from convenient or quick.
Life after iPhone
It was good. I felt liberated, I could use drop box, I could share with just about any service that added the proper hooks to android. It was liberating. But it was frustrating. Overtime the rough edges start to make you angry. So I gave android one more shot.
Enter the HTC Desire.
The Sense OS - So close but ooooohhh so far
At first the Sense OS is mesmerizing. It's cool, it adds some much needed animations and, most of all, polish to Android. However, it's as though HTC tried really hard to do and fill in where Android was rough and unfinished, but decided to give up without a final check.
Great Additions to Sense OS: The hub. They have done this via a mac 'expose' like double click on the home button or an exaggerated vertical pinch. 7 main screens with user selected widgets (really just fancy skinned live folders) fly out. Each widget can be an extensions into your social network, email, SMS, agenda, world clocks, etc... All important to you and easy to get to. This is great, and a significant improvement from the iPhone 'drawer' approach which leaves you opening and closing applications to get to the same information. However, this is a Sense OS only extension, and from what my developers tell me, can only be achieved easily by extending the base android OS (not exactly developer friendly).
Where HTC dropped the ball: SMS, the keyboard. In an attempt to give you more real-estate on the screen, HTC has floated the auto-complete suggested words. In doing so, on screens like SMS (possibly the MOST keyboard centric application on a mobile device) it hides the 'send' button unless you select a word or hit the space bar. SERIOUSLY... this is just bad UX and polish.
The Keyboard, what did they do? It's like they had a bunch of engineers have a bunch of really good ideas, take the baseline Android soft keyboard and poop on it. The Sense OS keyboard on an HTC Desire has a worse hit rate than the basic Android soft keyboard (a la milestone) and really, take my word for it, It sucks...bad.
Finally, some of the service based applications are just really poorly written. With very little quality control in the Android Marketplace, it’s no wonder that from time to time I find a strange run away service that has completely drained my battery and made my thigh burn from a red hot handset pegging out it’s CPU.
Enter WP7 and the LG Optimus 7
Transition from Android to WP7
If you are going to move from one platform to another, Android to WP7 makes a heck of a lot of sense. Why?
Microsoft was kind enough to give you bidirectional sync with Gmail contacts. This is especially nice if you just sold your Android phone and have been forced to start using Gmail. However, like the Android Phone, say hello to your new Microsoft Live account. Now, the nice part here is that your old hotmail or MSN messenger accounts are viable options. And really, who doesn't have an MSN messenger account?
My initial reaction is a little bit of awe to WP7 is the crisp response and smooth clean animations. The new ‘metro’ look and feel is crisp and is based on a very strong contrast UI. Not everyone will like the look. But it’s fresh, and what I like is the high contrast reminds me of print media. The high contrast also makes it very easy to read and find what you want quickly. Microsoft didn’t try and push too much content into each screen, instead urging users to pan left and right and up and down smoothly. It is as though you are looking through a viewport onto larger canvas.
Other really smart thing that WP7 developers thought of, and not enough people are shouting about, is WP7’s heavy reliance on push notifications. This is a very smart way to build power conscious applications. Applications rely on push notifications to enable asynchronous service calls. One of the most awesome uses of these push notifications is via Live Tiles. Live Tiles are a great usability idea. They update relevant information about the application via push notification updates that don’t require the application to be open or running. Brilliant, I get my weather updates without a service polling in the background or having to open the application!
But what really shines above all else, the WP7 soft keyboard. It's stellar, hit rate is fantastic and it's the best of both worlds between the iPhone auto-complete and the android suggested words.
Other notables: Email, Messaging, People hub and Facebook integration is stellar. And the camera is just lightning fast.
There are, however, some compromises. There is no more mobile wifi hotspots, but there are some hacks already surfacing to set up tethering (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/easy-hack-enables-usb-tethering-on-wp7-phones/) so this might not be the end of the world! I haven’t missed multi-tasking or service based applications. The one exception is SIP. I use SIP phones almost exclusively for work, and MS has no plans to bring SIP to the WP7 soon. They want to do this via their new Linc service. Also no messaging service supplied by MS… c’mon! Finally, I'll miss Google Navigate. That really is a good app.
Ultimately, the transition from iPhone to Android to WP7 has been an interesting trip. But right now, I’m pleasantly surprised and happy with my WP7. With the LG Optimus 7 I find myself not longing for the polish of my iPhone and the openness of my Android. It seems to be just right. I've gone from iPhone to Android and WP7 and I don't think I'm going back.
