Apple iPhone -> Android Dev Phone

arty

arty

arty

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Hi all,

I currently have an iPhone 4S and wish to change to an Android phone. Part of the reason is because I'm going to be doing some Android development in the next few months, but I'm also wanting a more flexible device.

Unfortunately I'm struggling to make my mind up as to which Android phone to go for! :) The main problem is physical size; all of the best-rated phones currently seem to be absolutely massive (S4, Nexus 4, HTC One etc.) and I'm really looking for something about the same size as my iPhone, or maybe very slightly bigger.

Other than development I'll be using the phone for music playback (I have around 45gb of music on my iPhone currently), lots of 3G tethering, email, phonecalls (!), Skype etc. - gaming is not important and for anything more 'serious' I also have a new Nexus 7 tablet.

I've been looking at the Nexus 4 which seems like a good price currently but has no expandable storage and appears very large physically. Then I've also looked at the S4 Mini, but I don't know if that's hugely compromised compared to its bigger brother, and the One Mini.

Battery life is reasonably important to me.

Any thoughts? Thanks for reading :)
 
Best phone to fit with your requirments I would say is the Galaxy S4. It has really good battery life and you can just carry another battery if you need more, has a SD card reader so you can get 64gb fairly cheaply.

I would have recommend the Nexus 4 but 16gb won't be enough for you, the are rumors of the Nexus 5 (slightly smaller physically then the Nexus 4) having 32gb so it might be worth waiting for that.

Finally a lot of my friends have switched from a 4s -> s4 and were afraid of it being too big but they got used to it very quickly.
 
I have an iPhone 5 (from work) and now a nexus 4.

I think your choice will depend on your price sensitivity. The n4 has all the best parts of android (bigger screens, great os and cheap) and is very cheap. However it does not have much space and the camera is not as good as other top of the range phones.

If you are happy streaming your collection from Google music, the space issue falls away. If you need all your music locally then you will need the s4.

I wanted stock android and am not prepared to pay twice the price for a phone with micro SD and a better camera. The n4 was therefore a no brainer.

I also really appreciate the low maintenance nature of nexus devices. They have the same kind of fast update delivery as apple products. I don't like touchwiz (I had an s2 for years) or other skins and I don't enjoy installing roms in the pursuit of the stock experience (I always found a compromise emerged with third party ROMs).

In other words the n4 is insane value but may not be suitable if you arr desperate for local storage.
 
Thanks for the thoughts, guys.

The local storage thing is something I can possibly face up to provided I get used to the idea of being selective about my portable music rather than just throwing it all on there. Given that this could save me quite a bit of cash I'm certainly prepared to consider it :)

As an aside, I've been chatting to a couple of friends of mine who have both switched from iPhone 4s to Nexus 4s and they said that the physical size difference was something they got used to within a few days, so that reassures me slightly :cool:
 
arty said:
As an aside, I've been chatting to a couple of friends of mine who have both switched from iPhone 4s to Nexus 4s and they said that the physical size difference was something they got used to within a few days, so that reassures me slightly :cool:
Click to expand...

I think you will find the 4s to be comically small after you use the Nexus 4 for awhile, that is what happened with me.
 
Part of the reason I don't like the iPhone is that the screen estate is too small. Everything is cramped and I find it hard to use. Bigger is better!
 
I'm waiting for a replacement for my S3 so I'm using my iPhone sized S1 at the moment and it feels really small and uncomfortable to use.
You will very quickly get used to the bigger size just like Mrs Dimple did (ooh err), she said she would never get on with a phone as big as my S3 but I bought her one she loves it.
 
You want something smaller than an S4 so i recommend a S4 Mini yet you seem to go for a large phone with no expandable memory like the Nexus 4... Dont buy anything and stick your head in the sand.
 
Diagro said:
You want something smaller than an S4 so i recommend a S4 Mini yet you seem to go for a large phone with no expandable memory like the Nexus 4... Dont buy anything and stick your head in the sand.
Click to expand...

I haven't bought anything yet :p I was merely pointing out that my concerns about physical size have been somewhat reduced by talking to some of my friends.
 
I switched from an iPhone to an S3 last year. Don't let the bigger devices put you off. You do quickly adapt to the size. Every time I use an iPhone now I struggle with the size. It is simply just too small IMO.
 
Myshra said:
From a dev pov you should probably go for the best selling device over anything else.
Click to expand...

This is what I'd do - I'd probably go for a Galaxy S4 but also get a Galaxy S2 which has a very large installed base and would allow you to test on a lower res/lower power device.
 
I'd say for a dev phone go for a 'standard' device such as a nexus.

By developing for a standard android device you wont run into issues developing apps that take advantage of specific hardware features
 
From a dev point of view, you shoud develop on the Nexus 4 and then test it on the others. We have various devices from Samsung, HTC, Motorola, ZTE (representing our min requirements and also the popular devices) for testing on. But primary dev is done on Nexus devices. With customised versions of Android you'll often hit issues where things don't work as they should. Recently had a baffling bug where the code worked fine on the N4, but not on the equiv Samsung devices.

Source; I'm an Android developer :)
 
GeX said:
From a dev point of view, you shoud develop on the Nexus 4 and then test it on the others. We have various devices from Samsung, HTC, Motorola, ZTE (representing our min requirements and also the popular devices) for testing on. But primary dev is done on Nexus devices. With customised versions of Android you'll often hit issues where things don't work as they should. Recently had a baffling bug where the code worked fine on the N4, but not on the equiv Samsung devices.

Source; I'm an Android developer :)
Click to expand...

That's what i was trying to say in my previous post ;)
 
I'd still go for the S4 to be honest, if you want stock Android then you can use the Google Edition ROM or even better use MoDaCo switch so you get the best of both worlds without needing to reflash. In the example above the issue appeared on Samsung devices, which based on my own Google Play download figures account for well over half of all installs (over 40% of which are S2, S3 and S4).
 
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