Apple iPhone -> Android Dev Phone

arty

arty

arty

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
6,903
Location
Stamford
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 :)
 
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:
 
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.
 
Thanks for everyone's input, much appreciated guys :)

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...

In the end this is what I have decided to do, partly because this was exactly the recommendation I got from the guy I'll be working with. I have ordered a Nexus 4 as my main dev phone (and, if I get on with it, my personal one).

After some discussion with the company I'll be working for, I'll also have direct / unlimited access to the following test devices:

Samsung S3
Samsung S4
HTC Desire
Some horrendous Sony thing the boss used to use :p

...so I think I'll probably be okay. The Samsungs do seem incredibly popular so I couldn't really get away without testing on them.

Once again, cheers all :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom