Android or Apple?

AcidHell2 said:
It annoys me when people say that, It is the size that makes it useful and is what is different to an ipod. Android tablet is just an overgrown phone.
It has many great uses 90% down to formfactor, 10% down to a mobile OS.
It's not just for the rich it is for anyone who wants a media device, that's what these are at the moment, a media device for when you are out, on the sofa or in bed.
it's a very bad thing, unless they have a credible alternative, but at the moment they have nothing.
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I can see why you love Apple stuff so much, it gives you a 'default' smooth/slick experience, if that's all you want, then just stick with it..

The thing that kills Apple for me is the iOS, but I do absolutely love how 'smooth' the experience looks visually on iOS, it's almost enough to make me want one, however that's where it ends, the slickness for me is just a vain veneer on what is a very stuck in the mud OS..

The key differentiator is the simple fact that with iOS you have to adjust to it, and use it's workflow (with it's (even now, still) limited multi-tasking and non-widget rules there to keep the slick veneer in place)..
In a way it works, because having no choice does free you to some extent, with no way of improving things you just naturally adjust to it..
With Android, It's a worse experience out the box, but you can tailor it to optimise your 'workflow' and make it work for you, once you've achieved this, you really appreciate the differences between Android and iOS..

And this is where I am.. I love apple hardware, I love the initial veneer of slickness of iOS, but I can't go back to it until they make leaps and bounds to make it work how I want to work..

Just as an example to highlight a few things, ignore what widgets he has, they are rubbish, but it's just to show that 'flexibility' is the ethos of Android.

One thing I would agree, the Xoom should be cheaper then an iPad IMO, as much as I love the customisation abilities of Android, it does have some 'holes' in the forms of media sourcing/playback, and I think it needs to be hoevering just under the iPAD in terms of price to justify itself..

Personally, whilst things are still sorting themselves out, the Advent Vega at £240 has all the real hardware power of the Xoom/iPad 2, and will be getting honeycomb shortly, it's almost throw away money in comparison, and you can transfer your media to/from it over wifi/usb stick etc, with expandable microsd, I may buy another (returned a faulty one, have been holding off just in case the better build quality things like the Xoom where £350)..
 
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I'm sorry you can't seriously mess with an Apple product like I can with Android. Why would I want to change anything on say an iPad or iPhone anyway. If I did, it would still be the same boring mass of icons.
 
starfighter said:
I don't see the appeal of a netbook, it just isn't good enough for me to use around the house when I have a laptop and a desktop. and I am not going to use it out and about as it is too big for my pocket.

That aside the ipad2 has decent specs and is obviously well made and built, however the Apple OS makes it even more useless than an Android Tablet.

Lack of itunes isn't a bad thing!
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A laptop is too big for the pocket too, so is a netbook and a desktop. A netbook is not designed to fit in your pocket, a phone is. A tablet is designed for on the go movement that you can carry around with you or pop it in your bag. I mean some of them are that small girls can fit them in their handbags now.

Don't make me laugh, the OS is just the foundations of the software to allow coders to write apps and to be secure at the same time from standard users. It's the same as the Android OS... just a foundation.

It's the apps/hardware that allows these magically designed devices to have the functions they do.

iTunes is great, it's an all in one sync centre that allows you to play/stream/download/update/browse e.t.c. Theres nothing out there that matches this at all.
 
In a way it works, because having no choice does free you to some extent, with no way of improving things you just naturally adjust to it..
With Android, It's a worse experience out the box, but you can tailor it to optimise your 'workflow' and make it work for you, once you've achieved this, you really appreciate the differences between Android and iOS.
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I don;t get this, what work flow. What are you doing on android. I have well had until I lost to an android phone. And customisation is pretty much visual only and over clocking. Which achieves no useful benefits. It's not that I don;t like android, people keep coming up with customisation and I just don;t get what they are on about.
 
What is this debate about? If you are in love with iTunes get an apple device? Great good for you end of discussion surely?

I like owning real CDs and Blurays. I like having the best of both. My company put me in rental car a lot, most of which just have a basic cd player/radio. Boom chuck some Cds in. Going round mates house or lending them blurays easy.

If I want them in digital format too which I do, it takes the same time it took you to download it lol. Except digital music collection has always been lossless :p
 
At the end of the day all devices are just as good as each other. People buy them because it suites their needs. All of the devices can be customised, either with jailbreak or root.

Things can be downloaded, movies can be watched, songs can be played, earphones can be plugged in, there is touchscreen functions, bluetooth functions, cable functions and more and more and more.

It's all I have to say right now.
 
deadkomodo said:
What is this debate about? If you are in love with iTunes get an apple device? Great good for you end of discussion surely?
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That's the thing im not. But it offers something that android has no alternative. legitimate way of buying legal digital media.

deadkomodo said:
I like owning real CDs and Blurays. I like having the best of both. My company put me in rental car a lot, most of which just have a basic cd player/radio. Boom chuck some Cds in. Going round mates house or lending them blurays easy.
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Owning physical media is pointless. But anyway that's not really the point, this is for browsing in bed/sofa and for when I work away, either stuck in a van or in a hotel.
 
AcidHell2 said:
I don;t get this, what work flow. What are you doing on android. I have well had until I lost to an android phone. And customisation is pretty much visual only and over clocking. Which achieves no useful benefits. It's not that I don;t like android, people keep coming up with customisation and I just don;t get what they are on about.
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1. Ergonomic ease of use
Take the HTC Sense Text message widget and E-Mail widgets, they both are full height widgets that not only show the most recent text/email message, but also swiping vertically allows me to cycle around the most recent..

So I'm on my main centre desktop and I see a notification that I have 4 new text messages and 3 e-mails, I just want to quickly check what these are, now since I've put these on the 2 screens to the left, I just swipe left to text messages, and read the first one, and swipe up to read the others, once I've read one or more, I just swipe left and I'm now at my e-mail widget, and again, can swipe vertically to quickly check them..

I used to just click on each app icon from my home screen and use the full screen apps, but I've found that for me, quickly swiping/checking works better, it's the fact that it's all done with small swipes in the middle of the screen that improves my 'productivity', the widgets are designed to be like this..

Of course I could just use the classic 'click the email app icon or text message app icon', but there are a couple of issues, the first is the full screen apps require more 'swiping distance' and I have to articulate back to the home button to get back to the desktop to get to the other app, and the layouts of each app is a little different which slows you down a fraction.

2. Multi-visual tasking
On my tablet, I had full height facebook/twitter/MSN widgets on one page with a small winamp bar as well..
One thing I spend a lot of time doing is catching up with mates for a few mins each night, often we are on at the same time and might even have a quick chat with one of them..
So having the widgets on the same page, they are large enough to allow me to be reading/catching up on the vast number of facebook updates or tweets, whilst having a text chat at the same time.. And because I like to have my music on Random, I occasionally like to repeat that one song, or skip the odd track ,I can do that whilst still being on the same page.. This works for me because I realised that I always seem to spend 10 mins switching between all the facebook/twitter social stuff as it's how my brain likes to do things (1 thing at a time..), and having them on the same screen works for me better then disjointly switching between apps, and despite trying all in one apps, they offer too much of a cutdown feature set which doesn't work for me.


3. It's what works for me
You may look at the two small examples and say "Well I do 'x'" or "I use 'x' app" to give me similarish functionality, but the thing is, I've tried lots of combinations and found what works best for me.. sometimes it's just an icon and a full screen app, sometimes it's a small wdiget, sometimes it's a big widget, sometimes it's about grouping widgets to keep them all visually in the same context, and e.g. the winamp widget, I worked out I like to listen to music whilst catching up on the days events but want the odd bit of control..

It isn't always easy, as the phone came supplied, it wasn't that great, it took a while before I understood that somethings seemed to just work better for me, and I started looking at how I actually like to do things and then looked around for different methods to make it more productive..

The fact people just use the defaults and seem to get indoctrinated into this can be seen in other things, my favourite example is Sky+ (or any similar system)..
When I got Sky+, people kept telling me it was a waste of money and why would they want to record hundreds of hours of TV when they watch too much anyway, and saw it as being a bad thing..
The reality is, I was quite busy, and I was getting fed up of missing the odd gem of a series/program that I liked, or having to slightly re-arrange my time around TV Schedules..
Fast forward a few months, and it was a revelation.. I series linked everything I liked etc, and what happened was I watched far less TV< I could just sit down for an hour later at night when it suited me (Kids asleep etc) and just watch 3 programs I liked, with FFWDing through adverts I can squeeze in 3 half hour episodes of stuff.. Suddenly the TV was a slave to me, not the other way around. It was amazing looking back how often I'd sit their after a program I liked finished just surfing around the hundreds of channels looking for something else engaging to watch..
 
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That's not customisation though, That's just installing apps and widgets which doesn't need a unlocked and customization-able.

although as I said in the post it's a bonus for some.
 
AcidHell2 said:
That's not customisation though, That's just installing apps and widgets which doesn't need a unlocked and customization-able.

although as I said in the post it's a bonus for some.
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Sounds just like customisation to me. Certainly more so than screens of app icons anyway.

I've had an iPhone but now have a Desire. Many of the reasons given by Demon are exactly why I couldn't go back to iOS now. I use it extensively for work and find it much more beneficial than iOS.

Having said that though, its horses for courses. There is no definitive answer to the OP's questions, its all way too subjective.
 
reefoid said:
Sounds just like customisation to me. Certainly more so than screens of app icons anyway.
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Not in the way people mean, it is just installing apps and widgets. that is not customising os like people rant and rave about. That can all be done on a closed system. It's just at the moment apple haven't implemented widgets. Although I wouldn't be surprised if they are included in ios5.
 
AcidHell2 said:
Not in the way people mean, it is just installing apps and widgets. that is not customising os like people rant and rave about. That can all be done on a closed system. It's just at the moment apple haven't implemented widgets. Although I wouldn't be surprised if they are included in ios5.
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I think so many people harp on about customisation in Android, because it gives you so many ways of customising, people just use it as a generic term, people are probably referring to different aspects of it, but none the less it's indicative of just how it offers different levels of customisation depending on exactly what you want.

e.g. At a high level, widgets are a customisation, by default I get a bare bones desktop/laucnher which I can customise to a much higher level in Android, when (or if)..
Then I can even choose a completely different desktop/launcher system if I want to, with some really excellent ones that offer much higher customisation over the stock one..
Then I can easily customise the ROM, I can use a 'kitchen' to add/remove certain system features should I particularly want, or streamline the OS how I want etc..

Horses for courses, I started out with Android as it was on cheaper hardware, which I could customise to give me as satisfying an experience as an iOS device, in some ways' it's exceeded that, in others it still hasn't caught up.

It does seem that slowly but surely, the hardware has got to the point that they can now start to provide some of the slickness of iOS products, and still retain the 'pseudo' open feel to the OS offering a huge range of customisation without having to get into ROMs and rooting..

Case in point, the Vega tablet is pants out of the box, no market, ugly desktop etc.. it's £240, but essentially identical hardware to the XOOM Wifi, and with the custom roms and upcoming Honeycomb coming to it, it's a super cheap iPad2/Xoom type device..
 
As great as customisation on Android is, it is largely useless a lot of the time.

People can't seem to look beyond how they actually use a device such as this. I wouldn't pick up a Xoom and look at a widget (that likely hadn't updated properly anyway as many of them dont), and think "Oh yeah, this is so much better than pressing a button on a menu".

Same with the home screens, you have to swipe to the side 3 times to get to the furthest screen, or pinch and use HTC Leap for example. Why is that better than just pressing a button?

I really like Android and I really like iOS, both have their good and bad points but I fear that most of the good points put forth in favour of Android are very, very small issues to most people.

Yes, you can remove 'bloatware' or things you dont use, how much bloatware do you get with an iPad for example that affects the performance of the device in any way? People only run in to issues because they are running iTunes (which is badly coded) on rubbish computers. I've never had a single issue with it.

The one thing I will say HUGELY in favour of Android is the notification system, its miles ahead. Is that as important on a tablet? No.
 
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