Android or iPhone?

[gilesgoat]

I don't say Objective C is not an interesting concept by its own .. but .. kinda looks a bit like "a cross between COBOL and
LISP" ..

If anyone's dislike for a language is based on how it *looks* (Oh NOES, it uses SQUARE BRACKETS!), they're fucked from the start.

Obj-C is a much faster (in development time), vastly more consistent, language to develop in than C++. On the Apple platform, you also have the benefit of a very useful set of libraries beyond Foundation. Less code == less bugs. Shallower inheritance hierarchies == less confusion.

There *is* a performance overhead, but the ways around that are well-known. spend some of the time you wouldn't have spent debugging and coding in profiling and fixing it. You still win in most cases.

I was quite fond of PASCAL, I am getting more and more fond of VHDL as well .. speaking about parenthesis I think we all
know the horror of a missing or one too much '}' in some very long C/C++ code.

Anyway "look" is someway important as well, considering that "you'll be typing it all day", speaking for "pure look beauty"
I think "nobody can beat APL" so far

Anyway I do love C "beyond any limits" and of course ASM too, "when your brain is tuned for C is tuned for C" C is like
"puppy love" or a "meth addiction" or "a gift for the man from God (*)" or "I am the Alpha and the Omega"
or "you would not have another God other than me" or something like that

I like the idea/concept of "messages" and "messages catchers" in Objective C that certainly is an interesting idea.

About profiling/debugging/etc. .. "this is art man" another thing to talk long about.

Anyway the key element for us now is not "a discussion on Obj C" but iPhone or Android.

My suggestion ? I don't know .. I mean "if one wants just to code in a cheap way with a cheap phone" the answer is
obivious "go for Android" .. if one wants to try iPhone because wants to try iPhone then "you need more money" because
you have to buy one iPhone and a Mac to code on ( or do some weird things ).

From what I've seen from Yak certainly the learning curve of iPhone is a bit steep at beginning, documentation is really
quite a bit crap/wrong/incomplete in points I heard various amount of swearwords involved before to get the point that
"now this thing really works as it should" but then things seems to go quite easy.

Haven't put one finger on it yet, busy doing other things, from "bits and pieces" I hear from Yak there are moments I think
"strange, I thought the OS would have took care of this but no your code has to keep care of" .. I can also tell I've seen
( and heard the corresponding set of swearwords ) that XCODE seems to crash quite frequently and die "by its own"
when you test stuff.

It is well possible to make the iPhone crash as well while doing code that "you think should be right"

But apart from that it seems to be working certainly I am seeing results coming out.

We'll see how much shite we'll get when we'll put together my code with Yak's code


Ah note 2 ( but I don't want to open "a philosophical thread about this" here ) .. I am an "hardware
coder/manufacturer" .. I do not consider "a programming language" a thing like :

When POST.name FROM HTML.theform = 'Pippo'
SendReply HTML.answer(yourname=name) AS Flash.obj WITH movie.mov;

Ok .. "yes but no yes no" ..

A programming language is "while (*c++ != 0x00) i++; "

Now here we are talking








(*) add "Motorola 68K asm, the assembler of God"

[Deckard]

I know I am a bit of a but I know ansolutely no-one who has gone from an iPhone to Android and I know 7 people who have gone the other way.

[Misfit]

I know I am a bit of a but I know ansolutely no-one who has gone from an iPhone to Android and I know 7 people who have gone the other way.

Knew you'd be around to back me up.

I'm not pro Apple at all and have had both and wouldn't yet have an android phone. The user experience doesn't come close. Somethng about the responiveness and glass screen of the iPhone.

Really the best thing to do is to play with both and see which you prefer.

Try typing on both in landscape too. I can type quicker and more accurately on the iPhone than on any qwerty phone i've had. Of course the downside of touch keyboards is the loss of viewable screen whilst the keyboard is visible.

[Guru-Meditation]

Posting this here because it shouldn't really go in the iPad thread

But I'm really not sure what all the Android fuss is about? OK it's open source and has lots of apps but there isn't really anything special about it, it certainly doesn't give the lovely experience of something like the iPhone interface.

It's like the whole Windows vs Mac OS X vs Linux debate. There's no right or wrong but how well people work with different operating systems.

One article put out the argument that it's possible some people using iPhones who would otherwise love Android will never "get" it because it's a different OS with different mannerisms. Therefore as soon as they try to do anything with Android they'll think "That doesn't work like my iPhone does" and give it up. A lot of people using Windows would be much more at home with OS X, but not necessarily all of them and in the constant arguing for trying to be right and validate that one of the operating systems is the absolute best it gets lost that the right solution for one isn't the right solution for all.

The iPhone has become ubiquitous. You know people who have them, there are plenty of resources available when you want to try to figure out how to do something, if there's something you're not quite sure how to do you can easily find out how to do it or if it's possible. That community isn't quite there with the Android.

The G1 and early versions of Android were OK but weren't enough to pull me away from my existing phone. The phones and the OS have been getting better and better and I took the plunge with the Nexus One. And I love it, it's fantastic. I love the new Maps Navigation, I love my widgets, I love the notification bar. And of course there's Locale ($10 from the app market) which can just as easily be set up to use my GPS so the phone knows when I'm at work and automatically go into Silent mode as it can be set to start up Pandora Radio as my alarm clock in the morning. Any time I'm calling internationally Google Voice automatically steps in and saves me $1 a minute on my call (and works so much better than Skype ever did on my Windows Mobile phone).

One of the cuter arguments were people saying it doesn't have pinch-zoom, on the other hand it has double tap zoom and one double tap has been all I needed to zoom correctly to the column of text I want to read. But I can definitely see this being like the "right click" argument.

I know other people here who've jumped from the iPhone to the Droid and haven't looked back. I didn't myself as I'm a T-Mobile customer, hence little Nexus here. I don't have a problem if people like the iPhone and iPhone OS. I have an iPod Touch at home, the wife seems OK with it and I can see the appeal. But it just isn't my thing. Fabulous piece of tech but it doesn't grab my geekstrings in a way the Nexus has.

[Orava]

I've just broken my N73, the little four-way joysticky thing has snapped off. I know I have big farmer-hands but even then. How solid are those touch-screen ones?

How about N97? I would feel all weird without a Nokia.

[Darkflame]

Nokia seems getting quite far behind with phones though.
They introduced the first phone with a compass, and now they don't want to use compass's anymore, at a time when everyone else is integrating the functionality nicely onto their phones and apps.

[Guru-Meditation]

Couldn't say, T-Mobile are more interested in HTC and Motorola. Heck I don't really think any of the main providers over here are really into Nokia. If they're not pimping HTC or Motorola it's Samsung. I've heard good things about the N900 and Maemo though.

If it's a glass touch screen then they're typically pretty solid. If you're nervous you can always get a screen guard.

[seanyseansean]

I know I am a bit of a but I know ansolutely no-one who has gone from an iPhone to Android and I know 7 people who have gone the other way.

I've seen the opposite in my office.

I used to have a 2G iphone which I gave to the bird and got a Hero instead.

Then our graphic designer Alan got one, then Simon, then two of the Java coders got one. Then we converted an iphone user and a ipod touch fan.

I personally moved because the lack of background apps is a killer. Once i'd played with a mates HTC Magic it took me a few hours but I realised - I was browsing the web, an email would pop up and i'd just flick the shade down to check it, then flick it back up if it wasn't important. All the time whilst streaming audio and controlling my squeezebox.

Even little things like apps to create ringtones, or a background app to background copy all my SMS messages to my gmail account, none of them could ever work on an iphone due to the judgment of St Jobs.

If you use your phone like a computer then get Android. If you play games or enjoy loads of bizarre apps , then get an iphone.

From a dev point of view you can knock up a simple "Hello World" for Android in about 2 minutes after installing eclipse (free) and the sdk (free). You don't need anyones approval to write stuff, which is nice, and your apps go live minutes after you upload them to the Market.

Just my 2c

[arron]

Then our graphic designer Alan got one, then Simon, then two of the Java coders got one. Then we converted an iphone user and a ipod touch fan.

I personally moved because the lack of background apps is a killer. Once i'd played with a mates HTC Magic it took me a few hours but I realised - I was browsing the web, an email would pop up and i'd just flick the shade down to check it, then flick it back up if it wasn't important. All the time whilst streaming audio and controlling my squeezebox.

Even little things like apps to create ringtones, or a background app to background copy all my SMS messages to my gmail account, none of them could ever work on an iphone due to the judgment of St Jobs.

If you use your phone like a computer then get Android. If you play games or enjoy loads of bizarre apps , then get an iphone.

From a dev point of view you can knock up a simple "Hello World" for Android in about 2 minutes after installing eclipse (free) and the sdk (free). You don't need anyones approval to write stuff, which is nice, and your apps go live minutes after you upload them to the Market.

Just my 2c

Basically the reasons we got them here as well. In fact I was the third member of the team to get one so it made sense to get one myself. And being able to multi-task in collecting data in the background with one application whilst dealing with the previous data run is quite an important part of why we chose them over anything else. Oh, and the scripting support through ASE is going to come in handy in future as well.

[Deckard]

Horses for courses then but multi tasking is fully available thru the jailbreak as is tethering.

[arron]

Horses for courses then but multi tasking is fully available thru the jailbreak as is tethering.

I don't think you can guarantee "jailbroken phones" if we have to borrow people's for what we have in mind at short notice.

[Bubba]

Horses for courses then but multi tasking is fully available thru the jailbreak as is tethering.

Now I love my iPhone, but it multitasks appallingly in comparison to android phones. If you want customisation, Eclipse (shudder) or multitasking get an android. If you want apps, own a mac or want to surf the net on the go then get an iPhone.

If you want to make phone calls, get neither. My 3G is virtually useless (due to shit o2 signal - cheap old nokia gets 2 bars where iPhone gets no service) as a phone, especially with said multitasking enabled.

Cheers

Bubba

[Deckard]

This might be contentious but frankly you're an idiot if you haven't JB your iPhone - I'd do it just for sbsettings alone.

[Rhythm]

I'd say neither. I've used an iPhone and I own an Android handset and neither work anywhere near as well as any Symbian or Blackberry handset I've owned. Both Google and Apple seem unable to grasp the concept of a mobile being a phone first and everything else second.

On a more basic level, the battery life of both Android and iPhone OS handsets is shockingly poor, and the iPhone is disgustingly bulky compared to even full qwerty handsets

all that said, if you're set on one or the other then I'd say iphone's the choice to make if you have even the slightest interest in gaming

[seanyseansean]

I'd say neither. I've used an iPhone and I own an Android handset and neither work anywhere near as well as any Symbian or Blackberry handset I've owned. Both Google and Apple seem unable to grasp the concept of a mobile being a phone first and everything else second.

On a more basic level, the battery life of both Android and iPhone OS handsets is shockingly poor, and the iPhone is disgustingly bulky compared to even full qwerty handsets

all that said, if you're set on one or the other then I'd say iphone's the choice to make if you have even the slightest interest in gaming

ANY Symbian?

I got given a Nokia 5800 from work last year, first Nokia i've had for about 8 years. It's easily the worst phone i've ever used.

1. When handing over between 2g/3g, it gives up and just gives no signal until you reboot.

2. Each time the internet is used it keeps prompting me for the profile (wap/gprs/whatever), EVERY FUCKING TIME. You can't stop it either.

3. Browser is crap

I know S60 or whatever it is is considered the worst of the Symbian lot, but whatever, it's worse than any featurephone or smartphone i've used ever.