oliversmartphonenerd-blog

[oliversmartphonenerd-blog]

Something that bothered me a lot about some Android phones with a notch.

So, rounded corners are nice to look at. But when you have rounded corners on the bottom and sharp edges on the top it just looks horrible. You can only avoid this by blacking out the notch altogether which I wouldn’t want. But what’s so hard about making the corners round as opposed to cutting the screen off right underneath the notch?

That’s what I prefer about the iPhone. The entire surface of the screen is used in the game and all corners are equally round. (Thank goodness symmetry is important to Apple)

[oliversmartphonenerd-blog]

Never again would I just go for a plain black smartphone.

What’s your favorite color on a device?

[oliversmartphonenerd-blog]

The eternal iOS vs Android debate

So, hello everyone. Since this is my first entry as a tumblr user, maybe not too many people will read this but that won’t keep me to tell you a little story of my personal experience with smartphones and what I think is the better platform of the two mentioned in the title. My very first smartphone (let’s only start counting from the time when smartphones actually WERE smart, with easily downloadable apps and whatnot) was an iPhone 4. Got it off contract and a plan separately to keep monthly rates as low as possible. I stayed with Apple for several years, even built the entire infrastructure around my iPhone with a Mac, an iPad, an Apple TV and even an AirPort Extreme. Then came the time when I got bored with my phone and mostly its tiny screen. Actually I just got the iPhone 5S right after release and I loved Touch ID, the color (got the golden version) etc. But many friends of mine had Android phones that were oftentimes significantly larger. So in order to get a much larger phone I switched to Android and stayed there. From Kitkat all the way to Android Pie, from Samsung over Motorola to Huawei, I got quite a few models and I was very happy with most (except for the Moto X Style which has a different name in the US, that was a piece of junk!). My last Android phone which I’ve only had for about four months now was the Huawei P30 Pro. Amazingly versatile camera, brilliant low light performance, beautiful colors (on the back of the device I mean), humongous battery life and all, I love it. But I decided to switch back to Apple now. I picked the often criticized iPhone Xr for numerous reasons: It’s cheaper than the regular model, it got a better battery life and it comes in cool colors. Of course, coming from a phone of almost 6.5″, 8 GB of RAM, a quadruple camera and a battery of over 4000 milliamps I thought I might regret the potential downgrade. You know what? So far I can’t say that I do. The yellow (in which I got the iPhone) is beautiful, the screen is nowhere near as bad as people say (even though understandably it could still have a higher resolution at this price point). In fact it’s even quite good. The camera isn’t good for zoom like the 5x optical of the P30 Pro, also not very good for macro or night shots. But the HDR is way nicer and portrait works almost as good. Something else I’ve always loved about Apple was the attention to detail. The effects implemented in iMessage, Animoji with the cool MeMoji that you can make of yourself, all that is so very well done. Especially the face tracking of the latter works so well it puts everything else (sorry Samsung with your creepy avatars) in the shadow.

Now, since this is supposed to be a differenciated evaluation rather than an iPhone Xr review I’d like to get back to the differences. See, both Android and iOS come with their very own qualities and faults. What’s better for you simply depends on what you need and what you want. You want great ways to personalize your phone in both the way it works and looks? Android is for you. You want as much variety as possible when you want to get a new phone? Android has tons of phones it’s running on, from cheap to very pricey.  Since there are so many different companies, they all try to make their flagships unique. So you can expect all of them to have specifications that you won’t find in most other handsets. Of course with iOS, you’re stuck with Apple’s iPhones. Do you appreciate consistency throughout the entire UI and across all apps? Sounds like you might appreciate iOS (believe me, when every other app seems to have their own set of emoji, it looks very much like patchwork on Android). Both software and hardware are made from the same company so it’s exceptionally well balanced. For a phone that doesn’t have anywhere near as much RAM as some flagship android devices, it’s still pretty damn fast. Even the Xr is quite snappy. The UI is not very flexible but that might also help making it very simple and easy to understand. The flat design is very well executed, especially with the silky glass effects in different menus etc. But I also love Google’s material design to death. It’s really hard to say if I have a clear favorite here.

When it comes to the gimmicks and playful features or animations, as I’ve mentiones that hardly compares to anything else on the market. 

One thing one has to keep in mind as well is the support of third party developers. Of course it’s self-explanatory that if you develop a mobile game, you’re more prone to start with iOS as your platform. You don’t have to pay attention to too many different configurations of chipsets and other hardware such as different screen resolutions and aspect ratios. So it’s less work for you to focus on iOS with just the iPhone and maybe the iPad. That was also one of the reasons I wanted to switch back to iOS. I’m highly anticipating the game Oceanhorn 2, which will come out as an iOS exclusive in the beginning. You will notice that with several apps.

Yet another reason was that I’m planning to get an Apple Watch. In comparison, I can’t say I dislike Android Wear but you can tell it’s struggling. Google seems to be not too interested in it. The watch I had kept disconnecting which was a big pain in the butt. It was oftentimes just annoying that I had to get into the Wear App on the phone, restart the watch and reconnect the whole thing. When I tried the Apple Watches of friends of mine, I found the user experience to be of a higher quality.

But lastly, the only real but CLEAR advantage of iOS over Android is the iPad. I mean, even though there might be high quality Android tablets on the market (and still coming up). But they will always have that one particular and crucial flaw: The app support. Apple takes great pride in the quality of their iPad apps on the App Store. They make sure that developers utilize the best APIs for the platform. Android tablet apps are usually inferior as they are only inflated Android phone apps that poorly make use of the screen’s larger real estate. So yeah, my conclusion is that as far as I can tell, wether iOS or Android is better merely depends on your needs and personal taste. With the exception of the iPad which is in my opinion the clear winner over any Android tablet on the market (since even Google refrained from making their own tablets because they realized their position). I’d like to know your point of view on this subject. So feel free to leave comments. Best regards, Oliver