Yet the problem with your phone doing all of this location-aware intelligence is that you wind up with the dead-battery he started his article out with.
Whenever I read articles like this one I'm left wondering whether my life is distinctly different from most. I generally have a pretty good idea about my calendar - where I'll be going that day, and what restaurant I'll grab a bite to eat in if that's part of my agenda.
These services built around finding a great noodle shop in some far-flung town are neat demonstration-cases, but to me they're about as useful as "Hotel Tonight". In my life, I don't ever anticipate winding up in a new city without knowing where I was going to sleep that night beforehand.
Maybe I just plan differently because I've needed to up until now - or maybe this is the start of an evolution that I'm already beyond - but given the choice of a phone whose battery lasts all day so I can find things when I want them versus a phone that's dead by 3pm because it's been busy coming up with the top 5 museum exhibits I won't have time to go check-out, I'll always pick the former.
I was very skeptical of Google Now originally, and disabled it after a week on the Nexus S. It never gave any useful info, and indeed made it unlikely the battery would last the day.
But with the Nexus 4 I left it on, and have been finding it useful regularly ever since. Zero-action directions and timetables for getting home after a night out. Directions to local places I've recently searched for on maps. The automatic "hey, you need to leave now for this event" notifications. And yes, the whole experience with taking a trip outlined in the post feels closer to magic than any other technology product ever.
At this point I'd probably leave Google Now on even if there were issues with battery life. But I'm easily getting 3-4 days per charge, so it's a total non-issue. (Right now I'm at 41% battery, with 3 days 3 hours since the last recharge).
Yes, very early on in my use of my Nexus 7, Google Now pointed out that there was a concert coming up for a band that I love in my city. Bought a ticket right then. Would have been disappointed to miss the show.
That's not a very location-aware use case (at least not GPS-granular-location-aware), but I dig Google Now for that kind of thing. Also when it shows me when my wife's flight is delayed or something, all because she forwarded me a flight itinerary from her travel agent. One of those things that seems like magic--which is kinda silly because like most folks here I obviously get what the code probably looks like. But still seems like magic. I think that's what I like about Google Now--the little bits of occasional delight that it pushes down to me.
Right. The magic is, when you search for example, some place, Later you will be surprised your phone pushes some notifications about the weather of that place, how and how long time to get there...
You don't need to tell google where you want to go or what info you need, Google Now provide all necessary or maybe-useful info to you automatically. But yes you can trigger it off.
And it is not so smart as we except, kinda like AI. I hope it will be the REAL personal assistant, not just like Siri, you have to send order before it acts as smart.
No, it always has a WiFi or HSPA data connection, and I haven't disabled any of the usual suspects (e.g. syncing or location services). Of course the display is off most of the time, and that's the big battery hog. The screen is on maybe an average of half an hour a day.
shrug. That's my usage pattern. I find it hard to imagine having the screen on for more than that on an average day, even if the phone is in active use more than that (e.g. when listening to podcasts, or taking a GPS trace during a workout). And of course there's the passive use of just having it constantly syncing. With previous Nexus devices just the passive background noise of Android was often enough to use up the battery in a day.
iPhone5 requires charging at home, work and in the car.
I maintain on average about 80% battery.
With my usage patterns the battery would probably last an entire work day on a single charge, but I have heard this is not the best way to run the battery.
My perspective on smart phones changed hugely when I recently travelled to a new city. Suddenly all of the features which I had paid little to no attention to before, such as maps, directions, business search, and recommendations, all became crucial. It's the difference between going to a crap restaurant and being overcharged, just because you're not a local and don't know these things, and going to a place which serves great food at a good price. The better your phone is at this sort of seamless deduction, the smoother your travel experience is and the more you can focus on more important problems. So for me it's an efficiency problem, one which is only going to become more important as international travel and tourism increase.
> Yet the problem with your phone doing all of this location-aware intelligence is that you wind up with the dead-battery he started his article out with.
Unlikely. The main culprits in high battery usage are the screen, the gps, and the radio when there's not very much signal. Google Now does not ever show up in my top-five battery users list.
An app itself doesn't use much battery unless it's doing something CPU intensive. Android reports the actual thing that was using the battery. For example, if I watch YouTube until my battery's dead, it won't say YouTube used the battery, it will say the screen did.
That is not actually true, because YouTube is quite CPU intensive. If you perform the experiment you just proposed, you will find YouTube has used a significant portion of the battery. But I see what you mean.
You could also try this: if Google Now is waking your phone up any significant portion of the time, it'll show up in the list as a low percentage app. You can click on it to see how much time it's keeping the CPU awake, keeping the screen on, using the GPS, etc. I believe Google Now processing is accounted to the Google Search app (because that is where all its output shows up). On my phone, which has Google Now enabled, it shows zero active time for GPS, screen awake, CPU, etc.
Actually, Now's time goes under Maps- at least the location services, which are the big draw. I have all of the tracking enabled, and maps uses between 20 and 30% of my overall.
Oh, in that case, yeah, it is using a fair amount for me too -- don't get me wrong, I'm still at 85% after charging it this morning, but maps is showing about 30% of that.
Lucky :) Even if I don't use my phone at all, it'll be below 80% by this time, and Maps & co seem to be a major culprit, since Now keeps on chugging even when the phone hasn't woken in a long time.
Interestingly, GSam battery monitor (which I just got last week, and is really neat!) shows the number of times each app woke the device. I've been on for 4.5 hours, and Maps is at 441, with the next Android System at 85 and Google Search (which is Now) at 53.
Android System has also shown up more in usage % since I started having Now.
I think there's definitely a significant drain with Now. I've had it enabled since the Verizon release, somewhere around 12/20, but I think I will disable it at the start of next month and keep an eye on how it behaves. I certainly feel that my battery life has gone down since the upgrade.
He's saying he doesn't think Google Now uses much power because it doesn't shown up in the battery statistics, but he also says that GPS shows high usage. I was saying that Android doesn't report an app's usage of GPS etc. as battery usage of that app.
Not on the HTC Evo LTE (Basically the One X). When it got Jellybean battery life too a nose dive. I often see Maps accounting for 70% of the battery usage with Google Now.
Now doesn't kill your battery and although some Androids don't have as good battery as the iphone, many are just as good and some are much better. Honestly if battery is the only thing holding you back, get a Razr Maxx and enjoy double the battery of an iphone. I'm still using an HTC Sensation with Cyanogen/Jellybean and I get about 2 days of battery with moderate use.
In any case, the article's use case is just one example. In general the interoperability and the deep integration allowed by android provides many great features that long time apple users just don't even realize they are missing.
Sharing anything between apps is one perfect example and by itself is reason enough for me to never consider iOS ever again.
> In my life, I don't ever anticipate winding up in a new city without knowing where I was going to sleep that night beforehand.
You're only one missed flight away from that happening. My wife and I were in that exact situation a year ago in Europe. AirBnB saved our butts on that occasion, but an app with preloaded data that was just checking availability on the (extortionate roaming) internet would have been invaluable.
I see both sides. I agree with you, I'm the same in that I plan very accordingly and would probably go crazy if I was in a "Hotel Tonight" situation. However, I like to know that if I was ever (somehow) in a "Hotel Tonight" situation, the app is there and ready to use for my convenience.
To add to your battery life point, I wish there was more exposure to how apps eat battery life on your iPhone. It would be nice if Apple somehow exposed that to the user to see where and how apps are eating up your battery life. I know there is some apps out there that sort of tell you, but no where near the level of details I think Apple should expose.
I'm the exact opposite. The anxiety I get from needing to stick to a regiment/ itinerary destroys me. One of my favorite parts of travelling (to cities like LA/ NY where Hotel Tonight is relevant) is hopping off a plane, heading straight to a meeting, and figuring out where to sleep on the fly.
There's definitely other kinds of people out there!
I feel like it's worth pointing out that Android makes this kind of information easy to get to - BetterBatteryStats[1] and GSam Battery Monitor[2] are both amazing in tracking down and fixing power leaks.
I think that this is sort of the core of the Android vs iOS difference; iOS says "don't worry about it, trust us to get it right", and Android says "here's enough rope to hang yourself with, but you can also use it to climb out of that pit if you want".
I'd argue that Apple makes it possible to create location-aware reminders, but not necessarily "very easy."
Say I want to set up a reminder to pick up some dish soap next time I'm near my neighborhood grocery store. I could open the "Reminders" app and try to do it, but that only works if the store is in my address book for some reason or I know the address. Otherwise I have to search for the grocery store in Safari or Maps, copy the address and paste it into the "address" field for that reminder.
So I've learned my lesson - next time I open the Apple Maps app and search for my neighborhood grocery store, thinking I'll add a reminder from there. But you can't.
Software is super hard, and I get that, and I still love and use geofenced reminders every day. But this particular set of interactions is too complicated for, say, my mom - who just got her first iPhone (and smartphone) - to use, which makes it kind of a problem.
It's very easy in Siri: "Remind me to take out the trash when I get home."
Arbitrary locations aren't easy, but the fixed "work" and "home" ones are... and for the purposes of this discussion, they all use the same battery life.
You really use geofenced reminders every day? I've found them useful once in a while but every day seems excessive. Maybe you were being sarcastic, it's hard to tell.
I have one that reminds me to check-in to GymPact when I go to the gym, and then I set reminders like my example above a couple of times per week probably. I definitely wasn't intending to be sarcastic but probably could have expressed that better.
there is also an App called Travelload which agregates all necessary travelling information and compiles it in a handy list.
Those location aware reminders are not so helpfull imho, if I am in a hurry switching trains, or afraid that there might be a traffic jam, or unsure at which gate my plane departs. Must take hours to prepare those with location aware reminders esp. in such huge areas like airports.
My #1 wishlist item, which would be easy to implement, is "guest mode" -- let me hit a button on the lock screen (or elsewhere) which lets me loan someone my phone briefly without any personalization or sensitive data. A standard web browser, phone app, etc. Maybe let me customize what apps are available in "limited mode". This matters even more on an iPad, which I'm generally willing to share, vs. my phone, which I won't let out of my sight due to fear of missing a call.
This would be for:
1) Loaning someone my phone briefly
2) Kids -- you might want to lock the phone down to a single app. (or, for me, lock the phone to a single cat toy application for cats)
3) Theft -- if someone steals my device, it would be nice to remotely drop it into "browser and email only" to keep him online so I can continue to location-track and then order pipehitter as a service to recover the device.
Apple doesn't care if I casually hand my phone to someone (usually, this is "oh, shit, you have AT&T on your iPhone and thus no coverage? I'm on Verizon on LTE. I'm driving, so maybe you can look up where we're going, use my phone") That's not going to keep someone else from also buying an iPhone.
I have one wish: that the iOS programmers at Apple learn how to write efficient concurrent code and that they stop leaning on the next, faster, generation processor so hard that any phone that is just one generation older than the leatest and greatest becomes slow as shit.
My iPhone used to be fast. Most things used to be snappy. Now it is slow as shit. From the address book lookups (which I have timed to usually clock in at 8-9 seconds, but which can take as long as 20 seconds) to the atrocious piece of penguin dung that is the podcast app. Seriously, Apple could not have created a shittier app if they had hired a bunch of Microsoft engineers to bang their foreheads on keyboards for 88 hours.
iOS software is fucking slow.
(Firing Scott Forstall to stop the skeuomorphic wankery was a good start. Now they need a real software engineering director to beat some sense into the engineers and to make sure they have "Concurrency 101" under their belt before writing another line of code)
The Address Book was built before 3rd party apps were even considered (remember all apps were web apps at launch) and was optimized for fast syncing. At the lowest level it stores an address record, and any required diffs in SQLite.
Every time the AB is accessed, all the diffs get reapplied. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, as people don't edit their address books often enough to generate a ton of entries.
Unfortunately the old Facebook iOS app and a few others that allowed you to "keep your contacts up to date" would hit every single contact in your Address Book every time the app was activated with a hidden ABPersonViewController. The allowsEditing property was set to YES every time, which generates a new diff with no (or a minor) change.
Diffs were sycned back to the computer, but AFAIK "merges" only happend on OS upgrades, since it was unlikely a user would be making millions of edits.
(this is all roughly from memory based on a painful debugging session with our iOS guy and a few back and forth tickets with Apple looking into extremely slow AB access for some users.)
While I feel your frustration with iOS apps in general, concurrency is not a silver bullet. I can't say anything specifically about what's making certain iOS applications slow, but I actually think it's probably more related to Core Data and file IO.
I can also say their new concurrency technology (Grand Central Dispatch) is one of the most brilliant pieces of technology I've seen in a while. The reasons why are pretty technical, but I think many people who have experience in concurrency would agree that it's pretty good.
No, concurrency is not a silver bullet, but when your programmers consistently make beginner's mistakes the software really sucks.
You do NOT allow the UI thread to hang on blocking calls. That's UI programming 101. And Apple engineers are unique in how consistently they fail to follow even this most rudimentary of rules.
Sorry. Have you see the source code of any part of the iOS system? No I don't think you have. Give me some reference to somewhere that the UI thread hangs. Not blocking the UI is taught to everyone who writes apps for the app store, so my assumption is that the guys who wrote the app store code know a little better than we do.
Connected to AirPlay, and you hit 'play'? Good luck if there's any kind of network problems, because it's going to freeze your music app for 10 or 20 seconds until it either works or times out. Everything to do with AirPlay is snychronous, which is a big no-no when most operations seem on the order of seconds...
Take a step back, observe what the app does. Whether it blocks on slow system calls or coarse grained locks is irrelevant. The point is, the GUI thread hangs. That isn't supposed to happen. Quite a bit of Apple software does this. This suggests that this is somewhat systemic.
I think we can do without the condescending tone. I think most people here are fully capable of distinguishing applications from OS. However, when Apple provide a suite of apps that are shipped with the OS it is reasonable to expect that those apps work.
Tangentially, I want proper support for background processes. Ask me if I'm Ok with letting the ABC app to continue running in the background and for how long. There's a lot of useful things that cannot be done on iOS because of existing backgrounding restrictions, which seem like a knee-jerk reaction to whatever performance problems they have with the OS.
OT, but you nailed it on the Podcast App - in fact, it is the first time that I've unequivocally been able to say that Apple released an absolute crap application that really had no future it was so bad. I spent two-three hours with that app trying to understand it's "model" and deal with all the bugs before I finally gave up. It was fundamentally bad.
On the Pro-Side - it opened me up to the really nice alternatives, like DownCast and iCatcher! that are absolutely fantastic.
Optimising code costs money, may make the code base harder to maintain and does not help much with selling new devices. I really hope there will be a future shift in making money from software, not hardware. Right now the opposite seems to be happening. :(
From my perspective Apple makes almost all their iPhone money from the software. The phones are lovely hardware, but look at the original iPhone and 3GS. They were plastic soap bars. It didn't matter because the software was phenominal. I think their problems with iOS are crucial. If they let the quality of their software slip for too long they'll be in serious trouble. I still think they've got maybe 2 years lead over the competition in their overall OS, services and applications portfolio, but that's less of a lead than they had 2 years ago.
I doubt you are hitting any processing bottleneck. More likely memory capacity/bandwidth and possibly flash storage speed bottlenecks. Probably on an A4 based iOS device? I agree Apple should do a better job for these older devices however they can't let the world revolve around 3 generation old platforms either. With the A5 and especially the A6 it's less of an issue because both have hit a 'good enough' point where they shouldn't be too starved on memory capacity/bandwidth unless iOS/apps dramatically change in the next 2-3 years.
> Apple learn how to write efficient concurrent code
Sorry but what ? Apple has one of the best concurrency implementations on ANY platform. GCD is superbly designed and combined with blocks makes concurrency trivial.
The biggest problem is that developers often try and over optimise.
> which I have timed to usually clock in at 8-9 seconds, but which can take as long as 20 seconds
Then we are observing very different realities. Beginner's mistakes have been evident for years and years in the iTunes (desktop) application where the GUI thread is routinely blocked by anything from network activity to slow disk IO.
With the latest generation of iOS, these problems have started cropping up elsewhere in iOS apps. For instance if you use the podcast app as intended, and download content directly on your iPhone, the UI has a tendency to block on IO operations that should have taken place in the background. The UI will hang and refuse to scroll. Also, the player has become really temperamental -- often refusing to accept volume control inputs via the screen for many seconds after laboriously starting to play a stream.
(And why the hell did Apple have to split up the iPod application in the first place. Now you have iTunes U, which is sluggish and buggy, you have Podcasts, which is sluggish and buggy etc. WHY!?)
I don't know if it was because I was running out of disk space, but taking photos and texting became absolutely terrible on my iPhone 4. iOS 6 made it even slower.
I have had pervasive problems with Address Book stores on Macs for years now. Psychotically slow operations, ten-second hangs, sync failures, endless sync failure loops, and general thrashing are not hard to find on any system handling more than a few thousand cards.
If there are substantial Notes? Good night. Supercomputers brought to their knees.
They need to have a way to set defaults for different types of apps too, coming from android that's incredibly infuriating. Also intents. Oh, and fix the complete mess that is notification centre, it's so cludgy and awful compared to android - e.g why the hell can't I swipe away individual notifications? Why do I have to clear all or none of them * rage *. (I'm a recent convert to a 4S as I'm putting an app into the store and need to use it).
Sounds a bit like my wishlist for iOS2 and 3. At the time, I wanted to write an app that analysed my call history and show me interesting facts. There were no call log APIs in iOS2, so I wrote an Android version, which at the time became one of the top Android apps. I kept hoping Apple would loosen up, but of course they didn't.
Anyway, I wouldn't hold my breath. Doing this would be a big pivot for them and with the amount of money they're raking in, there can't be many urgent calls for this inside the company.
I'd love to be able to actually replace Apple's apps with Google's. When I hit a link I don't want it to open in Safari, I want Chrome. Ditto with Map links. I want Siri to be replaced with Google Voice Search (and for there to be APIs that allow Google to fully replace Siri).
Not the orignal commenter, but I've tried switching to Android several times so I feel qualified to reply:
* Apple hardware is superior to any of the Nexus phones. Buttons don't rock without triggering action, screens are consistent colors, etc.
* There is a hardware home button that doesn't change locations. This makes it easy to get 'home' from anywhere, and, most importantly, to orient the device by feel in your hand without looking at it.
* The phone in't huge.
* Battery life is better on iOS.
* There is only one email app, not seperate apps for exchange / imap and gmail.
* The quality of apps on iOS is vastly superior to Android. Both in terms of function, but also UI. This is partly because of developers, but also because there isn't the screen size fragmentation issue.
I really want google to succeed with Android. I want someone to make a phone that's better than the iPhone. No one is doing it, yet, though.
There is only one email app, not seperate apps for exchange / imap and gmail.
The goofy mail experience was a big turn-off for me last time I tried switching to Android.
The quality of apps on iOS is vastly superior to Android.
This might be true on average, but in my case, I only really use a handful of apps with any regularity, and they all seem to be around parity on both platforms.
This hasn't always been the case. I've switched between Apple and Android about three times. The most recent time, just a few months ago, I stuck with Android. Because while the long tail of apps on iPhone look and work better, the top-100/top-200 apps an Android are roughly on par with those same apps on iPhone. Since those are all I use, the question turns to OS feature-sets, and Android has iOS beat on that front. If you're in to mobile gaming, though, you probably need to have an iPhone.
And the top 3 apps I use many times per day: email, maps, calendar are way way better on Android at least if you are using gmail. Without exaggeration, if you use gmail the main experience on Android crushes iOS.
There is only one email app, not seperate apps for exchange / imap and gmail.
If you enable IMAP access to your Gmail account, you can use the "email" app to access gmail accounts along with everything else. The Gmail app has a dedicated button for "archive" and it handles labels better, but you don't really need it.
The IMAP experience of Gmail is possible, but by and large ime it sucks. Gmail treats a email has having 0+ tags, IMAP implementations rely on an email being in 1 folder. This is a fundamental difference.
GP means that each email is under only one folder in IMAP. In Gmail it's possible to have multiple labels on a single email, and this is not at all elegant to hack into an IMAP view.
I also want other software, Apple's weather app is pathetic and it would be great if something more accurate could show up in my notification bar. As for why I have an iPhone, mostly because the hardware is great, I get a lot of mileage out of the iPod functionality and I do quite a bit of mobile web development that having an iOS device is handy for (regardless of sales figures, I see a ton more iOS web traffic than Android and it is as such a higher priority to test against).
The same could be said for Stocks, Game Center, Videos, Voice Memos, Reminders, and Newsstand. In my experience, I don't use these apps but they clog up my apps list. They should be optional - They could come pre-installed, but if I deleted them and wanted to re-install Apple just needs to make a Separate "Official Apple" tab in the App Store. The only App that arguably shouldn't be removable is "Settings". Even the App Store could be activated (or not) from within there.
I have a folder called "Unused" that includes most of those except Newsstand because it itself is a folder and can't be put into one (or removed). I don't really want replacements for any of these, but it would be great to be able to dump them for good.
Completely agree. I have the same problem with those apps but since I keep all my apps organized in two pages, I added a third with a folder called "useless" with all those in it.
Probably native OS performance + battery life (depending on which Android device one has it can be good [Nexus 7] to mediocre [Verizon Galaxy Nexus]). Perhaps they prefer Cocoa + Objective C to Java, if they're a developer. It's a tradeoff I suppose to which one considers more important. I like Android well enough these days and try to use Mono + C# when possible, but each platform has its merits and have to weigh what is more important as a user/developer.
disclosure: Android user for nearly 3+ years and owns a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 and a few other Android devices.
Siri is pretty great at the domain I use it on (directions, alerts, reminders, etc...) . Google Voice Search is not even close. Not quite sure why you'd want to replace it.
Siri is nowhere close to Google Voice Search in my experience. I have a very clear voice and Siri can't understand much with street names, restaurants or any word that can be misunderstood.
Google seems to have more intelligence when it processes your voice query--using Google Search results to help bring you the correct answer.
When Siri fails on me with multiple tries, Google will give me the correct query I wanted 99.9% of the time on the first try.
I'd replace it because I don't use Siri and I would use Google Voice Search. Siri has gotten my directions, alerts and reminders wrong enough times that I don't use it at all. If it could replace Siri I think Google would expand things a bit to allow more Siri-like functionality, but even at the moment a very fast way to Google things is more useful to me than Siri.
Nothing. I don't want anything new. I'm happy with the current feature set my phone currently has. What I desperately want from iOS 7 is a renewed focus on stability and Not Sucking. There's been a significant amount of additional functionality brought in over the last few releases, but it feels like in terms of stability it's not improved anywhere near as quickly.
Apple Maps is the first time I've ever had a "what the fuck were they thinking" moment on my iPhone. On my 5, it's really easy to accidentally switch it into 3D mode while zooming, which slows the phone to a crawl if you've got an iffy network connection. Like 30 seconds between screen updates. Just absolutely awful.
I want to be able to turn existing stuff off in Settings. I don't need a Spotlight home screen to the left, I don't want the ugly notification centre that I accidentally trigger and never use, and neither will I ever touch Newsstand or Stocks or Weather or Siri. How hard can it be to present a list of on/off switches - some of them exist already for parental controls.
I think iOS 4.x was the best iOS. I'd probably stay there too if apps didn't start requiring iOS5+. About the only thing I like in iOS5 is the weather app.
Google Now isn't awesome because Google exposed various APIs into their omniscient database. And they're not letting random apps grab 'Now' information for their own purposes either. They haven't played the "Open" card on "Now", at all, that I've seen.
So thinking Apple would match it by just opening some APIs is double-unlikely. Particularly not with their reluctance to allow any hooks that third party developers might misuse.
If Apple pursued this, they'd develop a first-party solution by more-tightly-integrating the existing first-party apps (Maps/Calendar/Passbook/Siri) and call it a day.
A measured step forward on that front is actually more Apple-like and would be less surprising than if they rolled out the more oft-cited requests, like widgets, services, siri API and changeable defaults.
Particularly since making Siri "aware" of your immediate future needs/obligations would be a feature multiplier all its own.
Ironically, Apple's services like Maps and Siri are the ones that are not very "integrated" but are quite "fragmented" instead, since they need hooks into different databases from 3rd party vendors of which they have no control on, while Google only uses their own Google search engine for Google Now, and their own Maps database for Maps.
Also, Google has already brought Voice Search to the iPhone. I think Google Now is also a service they'd like to bring, since it seems like one of those services where they would benefit if it was on the most popular mobile platforms at least.
Pretty much everyone I know who has ditched iOS has done so because of this reason. Seems to me like the author is just a bit behind and finally caught on.
I love the Apple hardware, dislike the closed options I get on iOS.
This is what happens when you market a phone as something that "just works". It's great that iOS is able to be used by kindergarten-level children, but at the same time, it's not.
My next phone is going to be Android-based, because I believe that I can handle using mobile devices expecting users to be able to think critically.
You might have a perspective problem. A mobile device that expects you to "think critically"? Come on now.
Some people enjoy building and tweaking PCs. Most don't. Some people enjoy tinkering on their cars. Most don't. Some people enjoy tinkering with their phone, "thinking critically" while using it; most don't.
I enjoy endless tinkering with servers, caches, micro-optimizations, and so forth. But I can't stand tinkering with my tools -- I prefer to tinker with other things using my tools. I consider my phone a tool.
Not everyone is like me, and not everyone is like you. There's no right or wrong, just preference.
> Not everyone is like me, and not everyone is like you. There's no right or wrong, just preference.
I never said there was. The poster I was responding to said that he disliked the closed environment iOS provides. Perhaps my wording was a bit more confrontational that I meant, but my comment still stands:
Apple's products are not marketed to or designed for power users.
That's really all I meant by it. I never said that everyone is like everyone else; they're not. Many people who enjoy tinkering use Apple's phones. These people are, as is apparent to me now (hence my buying an Android next), better off using an open platform like Android.
As an aside, it's just as easy to classify servers and caches as tools that should "just work". It's about perspective, and preference.
Personally, the biggest thing for me is file management. I hate it that I can't just connect a device and copy files to and from it via USB.
Now, I'm not saying that I need to see every file and folder on the iOS device, but exposing a data folder for each installed application would be a big help.
It's getting worse. My Nexus 7 doesn't allow it either, although you can work around it and (use it as a flashdrive at least) by pretending it's a camera.
I understand the problem is having a disk mounted by two OSs similtaneously. There is newer protocol called mtp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol) that is supposed to be the answer, but it isn't supported by older OSs. Feels like they reinvented the wheel though.
MTP is a complete trainwreck. The main problem is that the support in Windows is absolutely useless. Copying a big file and want to continue exploring the contents? Nope. Any kind of simultaneous operation will just plain not work. There is a very odd warning if you copy over plain old data like zip files - it tells you that the device might not be able to play the content. You can still copy them over, at crappy speed. But then trying to read them again will often fail with a weird error that amounts to "The connection broke".
Oh, and Explorer constantly locks up when dealing with MTP devices. It either plain crashes or waiting for data that is never coming, no matter, its blocking the GUI interactions for fucks sake, in 2013.
I was very surprised when I plugged in my Lumia 920 and a data folder popped up. I don't recall this existing in WP7, and it sure didn't exist on the Zune. It really can't be too hard or disruptive to allow this, the biggest reason I like it is for copying pictures from the phone without needing the Zune software or a network connection.
A more cost-efficient way of ensuring you're ok in OP's scenario (blown out tyre, phone battery dead), than buying an iPhone? Get a charger for your vehicle.
It's more than simple form factor. Apple's hardware integration work too is way beyond what the Android OEMs are doing, too.
One of the complaints in the article is battery life, and that's dead on. My wife's 4S routinely lasts all day. Occasionally she forgets to plug it in and in the morning it's crossed 24h of uptime with a little power to spare until she can plug it in at work. My Galaxy Nexus with the extended battery (7.77WH vs. 5.3 in the iPhone) will never make 24h without special attention (e.g. airplane mode, disable sync, etc...). And it's routine on days of slightly-heavier-than-normal usage for it to die before I plug it in at bedtime.
Some of that effect is simply the larger backlight (75% more screen area on the Nexus), but surely not all of it. Power management in iOS is just plain better than it is in the Android world, and quite noticeably so.
For me, that's an acceptable trade for Android's deeper features and hackability. But I won't say I don't wish it did a little better, and wouldn't begrudge someone making a product decision based on it.
For whatever it's worth: I got a Motorola Droid RAZR M a few months back, explicitly because it's not gigantic and I don't like gigantic phones.
It gets 24+ hours of battery life, even though I play Ingress a few hours a day (though I don't do much else that's heavily battery draining). It is not gigantic. It is presently on Android 4.1, and while it's not the entirely pure Android experience you'd get with a Nexus, it's not that far off.
The screen isn't anywhere near as pretty as an iPhone's, and the build quality is probably inferior (but, honestly, plenty high for me).
The most interesting thing about iOS7 to me is how Apple will handle the issues around iCloud Documents and data portability between apps. I appreciate they are trying to move away from traditional file systems because I really believe there are better ways of doing things. The problem here is Apple's approach isn't exactly working. In a lot (most?) ways it's actually worse than dealing with a traditional file system. If they can't figure it out for iOS7 I think they need to admit defeat and try something different. A perfect example of this is creating a text document in TextEdit on your Mac. It's utterly useless on your iOS device. You can't access it at all. Sure they could release TextEdit for iOS but that does not solve the real problem or address the problems of portability of data between iOS apps. In my opinion iOS7 is their last shot to get this right. If they can't figure it out dust off iDisk and just go back to the basics. It's annoying to deal with file systems but it works at least.
Google Now is the one feature that will determine whether I switch from iPhone to Android in the next 6 months. If Apple doesn't come up with something comparable in that time frame, they will lose a customer.
Same here, I've been a raving Apple product fan for years but Google Now and app-to-app integrations are just too damn useful to pass up. It's now to the point where it's an inconvenience to use some iPhone apps.
I am worried that so much of the "integration" people are calling for is integration with the services of just one company, Google. And most people that want to replace the built-in iOS app defaults want to replace them with Google apps so they can use more Google services. Is that healthy for the web?
Now, Google offers the best-in-class web services in a number of domains. But I've never been very fond of many of them, and where Google apps are less than great I prefer to use the alternative--Yelp instead of Google Local, standard IMAP email instead of Gmail, Wolfram Alpha for some searches, etc.
To Google's credit, it is easier to use an alternative search engine with Android than it is to use just about any alternative service on iOS. But I don't think we're going to see Google Now integrating with Bing maps or Duckduckgo or Yelp anytime soon.
"Integration" may benefit Google at first. You have think of the possibilities though if that integration is available to any developer.
Google is good at a number of apps but not all.
On Android, a lot of core functionalities built by Google can be replaced with a third-party app. You can replace the keyboard, use a different Home screen or Launcher, another app to manage your Contacts or have a different dialer.
I think the current situation is worse since only Apple can integrate tightly with iOS. Apple did allow Facebook & Twitter some integration though.
I think this is true as far as iOS goes--and it is more likely that Apple will open up the iPhone to third parties than that Google Now and so on will start working with third parties.
My concern is more with how so many very tech-savvy people, usually so skeptical of companies that get a little too ambitious--are extolling the virtues of a system that requires your email, search, maps, and nearly everything else be sourced from a single provider.
More on point, even if iOS allows for changing default apps, it should keep system-wide settings as far as possible. For example, the drop-down email sheet that apps can use will probably have to stay Apple, even if you're using Gmail for your mail, at least until there's a more robust contracts-like system. But right now this would mean having to input your email credentials into both system settings, and the gmail app separately.
I never read "you should follow me" as particularly rude, maybe a little self-important, but not full on rude. Once you start trying to get followers you've pretty much implanted yourself in the realm of self-importance.
It's pretty clever, but if I really wanted to explain why he's an idiot, wouldn't I use the convenient comments form directly under that without trying to do it in less than 140 characters?
The holy grail for me (and one that keeps me on iOS) is hardware. Apple knows this, which is why they are so aggressive in patent submission and litigation. Android terrifies them.
If Samsung/LG et. al. could make a somewhat more affordable handset with the design ascetics of an Apple device that ran stock Android, it would seriously disrupt Apple's position.
I had hope for Intel's concept phone [1], but it doesn't look like it manifested in the way it was originally sold.
The Nexus 4 is honestly an excellent piece of hardware. I'd still say the iPhone is better-built, but I don't feel like the N4 is far enough behind to leave me feeling jealous.
The screen size is a sticking point for some folks, but the device doesn't "feel" big (my dad is a vocal critic of too-big phones, and he rather likes my N4) like some other phones of similar sizes. The battery life is absolutely an issue, but that's a software issue rather than a hardware one; I average about 36 hours on a charge on my N4, but that did take a bit of tweaking (turning off location reporting services that are on by default, primarily) to get there.
All that said, I feel that in terms of software, stock Android is so much better than iOS at this point that it's not even a contest; the "battery life" issue is part of the double-edged sword that is developer freedom - on the other edge is a system that lets developers do wonderful things. Apple is absolutely still top of the game in terms of hardware, but they're going to have to do a hard burn to catch up on software.
Honestly, I used the N4 for a few hours and was left wanting. The size of the device really throws me off because I can just barely use it with a single hand, and it is extremely awkward.
It may not sound important, but as a parent of a 5mth old, being able to use a device with a single hand is essential.
Oh, I hear you. It's very different if you're coming from a smaller device. The screen size is a showstopper for some people, no doubt. It works for me, but I can see how others would like something more iPhone-sized.
(Parent of two here, I totally understand the "one hand" thing!)
> Samsung/LG et. al. could make a somewhat more affordable handset with the design ascetics of an Apple device that ran stock Android, it would seriously disrupt Apple's position.
Or, what if Google bought a company with great supply chain expertise? Then they could sell tons of those Nexus phones.
What about a Google retail arm? It should probably be a different company entirely that Google owns. It could sell Nexus devices and Chromebooks and have its own version of the Genius Bar.
I've never been a fan of the Nexus product line, so hopefully a company with a better design ascetic. The HTC/Samsung/LG triumvirate clearly focuses on a market saturation instead of flagship products. Frankly, I'm a bit shocked that none of the other manufacturers have tried shifting focus to less, but much better handsets.
RIM is trying it now though, so I guess we'll see how that works out for them.
I really liked the previous Nexus phones with the curved glass. The slight curve feels good in the hand. It also solves the problem of placing the phone face down and getting scratches on the screen without using a raised bezel.
Also, why would these companies abandon their currently successful business model? They know it works for them. I am sure they will all start pumping more resources into building a 'premium' brand like Samsung is doing with Galaxy.
The Nexus 4 feels much better to my hand than any iPhone. The iPhone 5 feels really awkward to hold to me and the aluminum feels much weaker to me than previous iPhones.
What APIs would something like Google Now need that don't currently exist? The only one I can think of is a way to launch it easier, rather than with an icon. But the push and local notifications, geo-tracking, ability to access your Gmail, and even the ability for Google Maps to pre-download map tiles are available to Google on iOS. What else does it need?
the ability for Google Maps to pre-download map tiles [is] available to Google on iOS
Google Now will automatically pre-download the map vector data before your trip, without you asking it to. For Google to do the equivalent on iOS, they'd need to be able to perform periodic background jobs, which isn't something that iOS supports currently.
It wouldn't be perfect, but the Google Now app could recognize that you're nearing an airport — something iOS does support, with background location updates — and then download the map data when it gets that notification. iOS apps can also share data between apps from the same vendor (via the Keychain, pasteboards, or various other mechanisms), so there wouldn't be an issue with passing that data over to the Google Maps app for offline viewing.
They aren't push notifications, but client-side notifications that respond to the user's learned habits and situation. I guess some of Google Now's functionality could be offloaded to push, but lots of it is based on the user's location, which isn't available on iOS to an app that isn't open.
User location is available to background iOS applications; Apple includes two APIs specifically for that purpose: fine and course background location updates. The app will be notified whenever the user's location changes, if it's activated or not.
I thought that only worked for apps that were once opened (since the phone last closed) and hadn't yet been killed by iOS's background task management thing?
I had a similar thought. Google Now's voice search is already available in the iOS Google Search app, so what would it take to get full Google Now functionality in that app? It seems like Google could get very close with what is already available api wise.
Is there something stopping Google from shipping Google Now for iOS? If you use Chrome on iOS they're collecting all sorts of information, you can also pull GPS data etc from G+ on iOS and associate it server-side.
You don't get the cool springboard shortcut though.
Google Now sounds interesting but when it comes to digital content apps (kindle, audible, etc), I don't see how shopping in your browser is even an inconvenience. If I bring up Siri and say "Google Game Of Thrones Kindle" I can have the book bought and on my screen with a few taps.
I've recently moved to an iPhone 5 after being on Android for a few years. I'm a heavy Gtalk user & it pains me that there's no official Google app for it on iOS - something I'd love to see.
There's adding enough APIs for google programmers, and adding enough data access for google marketers. I hope we get the first one, but that doesn't mean we'll get Google's apps.
Google Now has been pretty useless for me. Its mostly an annoyance, I'm always having to dismiss its place suggestions and "Time to home/work" notifications.
I think we all need to revert back to the days of 3 sometimes 4 days battery life on old school Nokia's like the Nokia 3315. It's amazing how battery life on phones seems to get progressively worse even though battery technology is better, we're still cramming in battery draining features when all someone needs in an emergency is the ability to make a phone call or send a text, not a web browser, email client and a Facebook app.
Sure making a phone call or sending out a message is all that you need to do in an emergency. But that's not what the cell phone is for anymore. Back when batteries lasted 3-4 days on a charge they were there for when you needed them. Now people feel like they need them all the time. This isn't a failure of hardware or software. A mobile phone isn't a just a phone anymore, so how can we expect it to have the same battery life as something that is just a phone?
I have a spare Android phone I keep on with a SIM card in so work can call me for server emergencies even when my regular phone is on silent. With 3G, Wifi and data access disabled, it lasts for over a week on standby, even with not-so-great reception.
If you're fine with returning to the feature set of that era, modern phones have huge batteries and highly optimized chipsets that exceed the performance of the old phones.
Whenever I read articles like this one I'm left wondering whether my life is distinctly different from most. I generally have a pretty good idea about my calendar - where I'll be going that day, and what restaurant I'll grab a bite to eat in if that's part of my agenda.
These services built around finding a great noodle shop in some far-flung town are neat demonstration-cases, but to me they're about as useful as "Hotel Tonight". In my life, I don't ever anticipate winding up in a new city without knowing where I was going to sleep that night beforehand.
Maybe I just plan differently because I've needed to up until now - or maybe this is the start of an evolution that I'm already beyond - but given the choice of a phone whose battery lasts all day so I can find things when I want them versus a phone that's dead by 3pm because it's been busy coming up with the top 5 museum exhibits I won't have time to go check-out, I'll always pick the former.