Android has been my OS of choice for years now. Well to be fair, if webOS had stayed around for longer I can guarantee I would still be rockin' it. My start into the smartphone game was the Palm Pixi (I know, I know) and I absolutely loved it, but ever since I made the jump to the Droid X it's been non-stop android. Well now that the big 3 have gotten to a point where it's no longer a spec race, and each have all of the essential features, I have been very curious to put a decent amount of time into each to see which really "does it" for me. And through a string of lucky scenarios I have finally acquired one of each that are still pretty much high-end.
The Samsung Galaxy Note II, the Nokia Lumia 928, and the iPhone 5. Seeing as the next iPhones don't come out for another few days (and aren't really an upgrade as far as general user experience go) and Windows Phone being what it is, I have managed to snag the top dog for each of those OS's. My trusty Note II on the other hand has been around for some time now, I myself got this phone in November of 2012. Despite that, it still maintains a place at the top of the android score board. Between the 720p screen, quad-core processor, 2 gigs ram, and 8mp camera I am very satisfied to still use this phone for another 6 months at least. And as most people understand, being broke makes it very hard to stay at the top when it comes to android and all the different manufacturers. So I will try to get a more modern phone for future articles I may post.
I recently spent a full week with the Lumia and came away some what impressed. It super smooth, the camera is ludicrous, and it's super user friendly. All these made it super easy for day to day usage. And getting used to the UI is extremely easy as well. I had a lot more about it that I didn't like however. The lack of proper multi-tasking drove me insane. Coming from android I am super accustomed to just launching the recent apps menu and jumping around from games to sports scores to messages, etc. On Windows phone you can long press that back button and see a card style menu to go back to certain pages and screens you were at, but it never seemed to save my progress very well. For instance if I was in a conversation with some one and I came back to check up on if they responded it would throw me back into the main page for messaging, this was a little annoying. Another huge annoyance was the lack of notification light and notification center. Sure something would pop up on the top of the screen, or wake the screen if you weren't using the device. But if I was away from the phone for an extended period of time I would forget to check through my messages or missed calls because there was nothing there reminding me. Lastly, the lack of apps was hard to get used to. On my Note I have a few dozen loaded up, a lot of games, weather, sports, so on and so on. I couldn't seem to find any in the marketplace that I wanted, heck even Candy Crush wasn't there. And even some of the basic apps like Facebook were just slow and glitchy despite being there for so long. Needless to say I was pumped to go back to what I was used to. For anyone new to smartphones, or older people just wanted a simple phone to do basic task like call, text, email, and light browsing I say go for it. If you've been with a smartphone for a while though, be it android or iOS, stick with one of those two.
And to wrap things up, I will be using the iPhone for the next week to really get used to it. I haven't had an iPod Touch in years and have had zero experience with an iPhone in general besides display units. So far it's not to bad, and I just updated it to iOS 7 a few minutes ago (which I'm not to fond of as compared to iOS 6, but we will see). But once that time comes I'll be writing up a much more thorough post about my impressions, and if it's enough to pull me away from android for a while.
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