After rocking a Motorola Razr V3m from 2007-late 2008, I was ready to experience my first smartphone. Money in hand with the intention of getting my first phone plan on my own, I headed to Walmart and picked up the iPhone 3G in Black. With a decent screen, camera, and 16GB of storage, it was enough to satisfy me.
The ability to easily look up directions to places? Amazing. Being able to browse the Internet from a small device? Incredible. And taking photos without having to carry around an extra camera? Very useful, especially as a constantly on-the-go college student
My iPhone 3G met and exceeded my smartphone needs so well that I eventually upgraded to the iPhone 3GS in 2010, the iPhone 4S in 2011, the iPhone 5 in 2012, the iPhone 5S in 2014, and the iPhone 6+ in late 2014 (see a pattern here?).
The iPhone Just Worked…Until It Didn’t Meet My Needs
Being a gadget nerd, I tried out various Android devices along the way. From the Galaxy S2 to the Droid Bionic, all Android devices I tried out had their flaws. Whether they overheated, lacked adequate battery life, or just had buggy software, none performed as well as my iPhones.
At one point, I was completely all in with Apple–I had the iPhone 6+ 64GB, iPad Mini 2, and a brand new MacBook Pro 13.3″ with Retina display.
Then I started to notice something: the iPhone wasn’t completely meeting my growing needs as a full-time project manager, aspiring photographer, and all around multi-tasker.
No External Storage
If there’s one thing I really enjoy, it’s taking pictures. I’m known as the photographer in the family, the one who has thousands of family photos from the past 10-12 years all neatly organized on a hard drive and multiple cloud storage services.
When I go to a concert or sporting event, you can bet on me taking at least 50-100 photos plus videos.
So storage on my phone is super important. I need to have room to store every video or photo I’ve taken in the last year on my phone. Retrieving these when I need them from cloud storage isn’t a good option, whatwith data limits.
My iPhone, even with its 64GB space, wasn’t enough to hold all the videos and photos I take. However, many Android devices did/do have external storage options.
No Removable Battery
From 2013 on, I carried around an external battery pack with my iPhone. It served its purpose, but constantly carrying it around was annoying. Plus, if I was actively using the iPhone, it would take forever to charge my 6+ back to 100%.
Depending on the Android phone, you can easily and cheaply have 2-3 extra batteries fully charged and ready to swap. That was attractive to me since I use my phone a lot.
Restrictions
The iPhone has both a blessing and a curse on its hands with the iOS software being closed. On the one hand, the software being restricted keeps bad apps from making the iPhone unusable. You typically won’t find bloatware or otherwise bad apps in the App Store. Because iOS is very well optimized for the iPhone and there’s no room for bad apps to inefficiently use battery/resources, performance is very good on the iPhone.
However, the bad part of iOS software being closed off is that it keeps out a lot of good apps/services. Things like Tasker, file management apps, Zedge, web development apps (such as FTP file managers) etc. just won’t be available on the iPhone. Want to easily save music/photos to your iPhone by dragging and dropping files? It’s not going to happen. How about saving a .php file and then uploading it to your website from your phone (as my many web developers inevitably need to do at one point or another)? Not on the iPhone.
App Availability
This goes along with the restrictions mentioned above. The Play Store has a lot of apps that you most likely will never see in the iOS App store. Some of these are incredibly useful, such as Glance which allows me to respond to text messages from my Pebble Smartwatch (more on the Pebble below).
An app called Twilight automatically changes the brightness/color of my phone screen after sunset so my eyes aren’t exposed to harmful blue lights that may disrupt the quality of my sleep. Apple is finally introducing a similar feature in its new iOS update due out the Fall of 2016, but I highly doubt it will have the customization options that Twilight does.
The Hola launcher allows me to customize my phone any way I want it. I can have all my important emails, texts, news etc. displayed on my phone screen, which makes it easy to glance, make sure nothing important has come up, and then go about my day.
Launchers, by the way, are things you’ll never see on the iPhone. For some, that won’t matter much. For me, it’s simply something that makes the way I use my phone a lot more enjoyable.
Pebble Compatibility
When I picked up my Pebble Classic in May 2015, I was still rocking an iPhone 6+. The watch, which cost $94, was the only one compatible with both Android and iOS. It worked well enough with my iPhone 6+, allowing me to accept/decline calls, pause/forward/rewind music, see email and text notifications etc.
Soon I found out about all the things that the Pebble Classic could do with Android phones. Things like all of the above, plus replying to text messages, sending text messages, controlling other apps, actionable notifications (quick replies to emails, Skype messages etc.) and a bunch of other things.
It annoyed me. I wanted full functionality with my smartwatch. I did not want to get rid of the Pebble and purchase an Apple Watch, which cost 4x as much and had 1 day of battery life compared with 3-6 for the Pebble.
Switching to Android
In early June 2015 I made a decision that scared me: I switched to Android. After a trip to Verizon and an order on their website, I soon had a Galaxy Tab S 10.5 tablet and a Galaxy Note 4.
My iPad Mini was given to my mom; my niece got my iPhone 6+. I quickly outfitted the new devices with skinomi screen protectors, a bluetooth keyboard case (for the Tab S) and an S View case (for the Note 4). 64GB MicroSD cards were put in each device. 2 external batteries plus a charger were ordered for the Note 4.
It has now been 7 months and I still have the Note 4 and the Tab S, as well as my Pebble smartwatch. In my next blog post, I’ll talk more about the adjustment period.
One thing I’m pretty sure of, though, is that I won’t be going back to the iPhone and iPad.
