First, let me start off by saying : I am not a geek. At best, I am a GBA (Geek By Association). Up until I met my girlfriend (about 2,5 years ago) I guess you could say I sorta knew my way around the internet, I knew the concept of chatting and did so intensively, I had a cellphone I used a lot and I guess that’s about it. And then I met my über-geek girlfriend…
She convinced me to take it a step further : I bought an iPhone 3G and a MacBook Pro, created a Facebook, Myspace, Flickr and Twitter account and even attended some geek events. But being the über-geek that she is, that was not enough of course. So two weeks ago, she found herself a new challenge : make me use an android cellphone (the HTC Magic with android 1.5 to be exact) instead of my beloved and familiar iPhone.
Now I barely knew what “Android” meant, exept that “you could do more with it” and that Apple “was a closed system” (Remember, i.am.not.a.geek) But hey, since I do like gadgets I didn’t mind giving it a try. I mean, at my age, why not try something new, try to evolve and become one of the hip geeks ? I thought it was my task to be critical but apparently my girlfriend didn’t share my opinion : it lasted about a week before she practically MADE me go back to my iPhone because she was going crazy over all my questions and comments.
Looking back on that week, here is what I can say about HTC Magic vs iPhone :
The HTC hardware definitely sucks big time compared to the smooth iPhone. I already had a HTC Touch from work which I didn’t like and my hopes that the HTC Magic would be different disappeared as soon as I tried to post my first tweet. I felt that the touch screen of the HTC Touch and HTC Magic were a lot less responsive than my iPhone’s. It took about 3-4 taps before a letter actually appeared on screen.
On the software side I immediately missed the little looking glass from the iPhone which appears when you press and hold in a text. Sure, you can use the trackball on the HTC but it doesn’t work as smoothly as on the iPhone. Another minus for me were the apps : my girlfriend installed two facebook apps on the HTC and they both sucked compared the one on my iPhone.
For example : neither one of them could upload pics. I had to go to the pic itself and then send that one to Facebook. I know this was mostly Facebook’s responsibility since they were the ones developing the app but it still affects my opinion on Android since i don’t have the same functionality. However, a big plus for these apps was the functionality of being able to upload pictures from the media gallery immediately with comments.
Although the camera on the HTC seemed promising with its the 3.2 megapixels, the quality of the pics was less compared to the ones taken with my iPhone, especially pics taken during the evening or in places where the light isn’t very bright. But it wasn’t all bad of course 
One of the major ones is the fact that apps can run in the background. I find this a big minus on the part of the iPhone that for example, every time I switch from webradio to, lets say Twitter, the music stops playing. I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t do something about that ? Same goes for the inability to load Flash on the iPhone by the way, which the custom Android ROM my girlfriend installed does perfectly. However, apps running in the background can really drain your battery, especially when you sometimes forget about half of them.
Conclusion : After one week I went back to my iPhone and have never been happier with it. Maybe I didn’t give Android enough time to get used to it and thoroughly use and discover all the possibilities. Or maybe it was because of the HTC hardware that I didn’t like it and maybe I would enjoy Android better on another cellphone ? Who knows ..
Either way, I do think Android and low tech geeks are a difficult match at this point. But maybe if with every new iPhone, the “wow”’s get less and less as they do for me nowadays and the apps for Android improve, my opinion will change and Android will become my “new iPhone” experience
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