Try an Android Smartphone- "Check".

At the beginning of the new year, I posted a blog about my 2013 to do/try list (see post here). Today I am proud to say that I am able to check off one item in the list- Try an Android Smartphone. 

I have been using the Samsung Galaxy Note II for the last couple of weeks now after giving up my iPhone 4S. I did not post a blog about it right away to make sure my assessment is not biased. I had to make sure I gave myself enough time to learn and understand the OS. I had used an iPhone for over 3 years before getting the Note 2 so I had to make sure I get rid of any expectations based on what I was used to getting with iOS. It was not easy but after around 3 weeks I am fairly confident I gave Android a fair chance so here is my assessment. 

Hardware Design and Feel.

The Galaxy Note II is huge but highly functional even for someone with small hands like myself. The feel of the material however still has a plasticky feel w/c to me diminishes its high-end value a little. Im not sure if it is just my Galaxy Note II or if the handset is designed this way but the seam of the back cover feels a little loose. I always make sure the back cover has snapped to a full close but I can still see a little gap between the cover and the housing. When I press on the seam, the back cover still presses in a few millimetres but it snaps back up making me think that there is a very small gap between the back cover and the housing. This little gap will surely allow some dirt and humidity to get inside the phones' internal components- hardcore Android fanboys may call me paranoid here. Say dirt and humidity won't get in thru the small gap, I still take issue in the fact that such an expensive smartphone could have such an annoying manufacturing limitation. 

OS User Interface.

My Galaxy Note 2 is running Android 4.1.2 OS and I will discuss my take on its user interface in two categories: Page Customization, Multi-tasking, and Touchscreen. 

Page Customization: Android OS allows you to manage your phone by organizing it into what it calls Pages. Each page can be  customized further with widgets and you can control the apps and folders in each page. The OS also allows you to designate a homepage where your phone defaults to. My Galaxy Note 2 is organized into different pages based on function/purpose. One page is mainly for social-networking activities, another page for communication, another for blogging, etc.  What sets Android apart from iOS in terms of Pag Customization is your ability to add Widgets on pages. This function is not available on iOS, but since I am not much of a widget guy it really did not matter too much. The only widgets I use are Flipboard, Weather and Clock. 

Multi-Tasking: All smartphone manufacturer today boast of their ability to help you become more productive and their selling point has always bee the multi-tasking function of their devices. This is where I believe Samsung and Google hit it right with their introduction of Multi-Window View. This functionality basically allows you to open two applications on the same screen allowing you to do two things at the same time and on the same screen. Since the Galaxy Note 2 has so much screen real-estate, the OS is able to split the screen between two apps without sacrificing much user experience with the app. I use this function a lot and is one of the selling points of this phone. 

Touchscreen: The Galaxy Note 2 sets itself apart from the iPhone with its haptic feed-back enabled touchscreen. This provides the user with a natural feel for typing on a touchscreen keyboard as haptic feed-back simulates what a real keyboard would feel while typing. However, I have always considered haptic-feedback as a cosmetic feature rather than a functional one as it does not really add to the phone's functionality. One thing I find really frustrating with the touchscreen keyboard though is how sensitive it is. Until now I still find it hard to speed-type without accidentally pressing the wrong letter. It only took me a few days to start speed-typing on an iPhone when I first used it. I started to hate the Note 2 touchscreen after a week of no progress in my typing prowess, until I discovered something amazing about the touch screen keyboard. The Galaxy Note 2 supports swipe typing and it has a very sophisticated predictive typing mechanism on it. Swipe typing basically foregoes the need to press on individual letters and therefore eliminating the chance of accidentally pressing the wrong ones. If you want to type a word all you have to do is swipe your finger over the letters that make up the word and the phone does the rest. The keyboard also has a super intelligent and sometimes super freaky predictive typing software. Every time you press a letter on the touchscreen keyboard, the phone suggests words it thinks you want to type, if you see the word in the choices all you have to do is tap on the word. For example, when I want to type: "Good Night Babes. I love you much." I only had to type the letters in bold while the phone did the rest. The more I use a word or a string of words, the better it is in suggesting the right words for me. As you can notice in the above example, the phrase "I love you much" only required me to type the letter "I" and "M" and the phone suggested the rest and all I had to do was tap on the words. This kind of keyboard is not available with iOS and to me this is the highlight of the Note 2. Considering the size of the Galaxy Note 2, having a very intelligent touch screen keyboard helps a lot in ensuring the phone is still very functional even for people with small hands. 

The Galaxy Note 2 is a very serious phone with serious capabilities but I still do not consider it an iPhone killer yet. I have run into some issue with the phone already and mostly software related. One recurring one and really annoying one has something to do with Application Manager option. When I go into Application manager to stop some apps that are running in the background, the RAM usage sometimes does not change. I see that the apps are being stopped and closed because it disappears on the list of apps runnings but the RAM usage stays the same w/c causes some problems. The only way I found to free up RAM space was to restart the smartphone. I am not sure if this is a bug or if this is something I should expect from now on? I also find that switching between applications with the Note 2 is inefficient unless the apps your want to use are optimized for Multi Window view (as of now a very limited number of apps support this). Killing an app running in the background to save on battery, data usage and RAM space requires you to go thru at least 3 places/menus on the phone- this is not cool for a smartphone.

Some features I did not find useful. 

I know all of Samsung's commercial shows the power of the Galaxy Note 2 in collaborating with people (ie. working on a presentation together, sharing screens, etc.) and you might be asking why I didn't consider this feature a key selling point for the phone. Well, for one my line of work does not require that kind of cool collaboration and even if it did, I would not be doing it on a smartphone but on a tablet. I also did not mention anything about face-detect feature and mainly because I stopped using it after a few days for two reasons: i. it drains my battery a lot, and ii. I don't usually hold my phone straight on my face- even when I'm reading a message or typing- giving the phone a hard time detecting my face and causing the screen to randomly toggle between bright-dim-bright-dim. It is another one of those features that sounds cool but in practice it makes very little sense. I also did not mention NFC because I never had the interest or need to use it. This has nothing to do with an aversion to innovation but rather with the fact that there is very little real world use for NFC aside from very limited mobile payments. Another reason why I have not tried NFC is that I still do not feel safe enough thinking that my phone now has direct access to my bank account- not cool considering the series of hacking incidents recently. Most of these features to me add nothing to the functionality, usability and real world grit of the phone and that is why I did not spend too much time playing around with them. 

So Will I be going back to iOS?

Not anytime soon. I really want to learn to love this phone. I have a lot of friends at work who love the Android UI but for now all I have seen are pockets of brilliance that gets bogged down by some of its flaws and cosmetic features. I am not saying I did not have any issues with my iPhone- I had some, but none of it had anything to do with how all the features of the phone made sense or no sense at all. At first I was disappointed how iPhone 5 did not support NFC, now that I have NFC capabilities on the Note 2, I am finding myself struggling to justify its existence. What real world benefits will an NFC enabled phone do for me? As far as I can see, NFC is still an industry struggling to find itself as it struggles to gain relevance from people it seeks to market- ie. banks and credit card companies. Yes, the Note 2 has a lot more features than the iPhone but do I really need all of it? Right now I feel like the phone is a Frankenstine of innovation or to put it mildly it fells like a model with too much make-up. I hope this perception changes soon.