Eating Humble Apple Pie

Imagine for a moment that you do a lot of reading on your portable pocketable device. Of the two screens above, which would you find most comfortable to read?

And that, my friends, is when I realised my 'droids were destined for the sandcrawler.

"Less is more" - seemingly, every goddamn time. For as long as Jony Ive stays at Apple I really need to learn to stop being so (expensively) curious about other platforms.

It's not that Android is a bad OS, far from it. In some ways Android is set up to allow innovations far earlier than they'll show up in Apple's eco-system (unless they are from Apple directly).

I don't believe Android is particularly fragmented either, but waiting for decent upgrades from the carriers or phone manufacturers can drive you nuts. Not to mention some strange handset design decisions, Samsung: "I know! Let's include a fixed internal 8GB SDcard and refer to it as external logically and have the physical external SDcard mounted off the internal logical external - how could that confuse anybody?!".

iPhones and Droids, let me count the ways:

iPhone 3G - Cracked plastic back. Dust under the screen. Fucked me right off after spending loadsa money to import it from Italy where it was sold unlocked (it was not sold unlocked in the UK at the time).

Nexus One - Stupid bug that means multi-touch can flip axis on you and fuck everything up. Absolutely awful audio recording components in my opinion. Pentile matrix to drive you dotty if you look too close.

Samsung Galaxy S i9000 - Pentile matrix to drive you dotty if you look too close. Stupid SDcard arrangement. Android Froyo 2.2 promised for "End of August" - it's now October and it's not available in the UK. Other annoying Samsungisms throughout the OS like no stock music player and some stupid stuff that assumes you must be running Windows.

Dell 5" Streak - Kind of endearing, but again no official Froyo after promises to the contrary. An annoying "slide to unlock" bug that means unlocking isn't as reliable as it should be and it occurs frequently enough (even on custom ROMs) to fucking piss me off. Some stupid framebuffer that fucks everything up to landscape mode even on vanilla ROMs - I prefer to be primarily in portrait mode, thanks.


Now for every annoyance there are some very good points about each handset. But it's the little things, it really is. Especially if it is your primary portable device. These little things get noticed. A lot.

Roll on next week and iPhone 4. Let's hope I don't shatter the thing. In the mean-time, I'll steal what time I can from my daughter's iPod 2G when she isn't using it.

(Oh, and all empires do crumble - Apple no exception.)