Day 6
Last night I had 80% of the phone charged and left it overnight thinking that I could make it through at least part of the morning without charge. I wakeup and try and turn on my phone to nothing.. The light at the top turned on GREEN (WTF) and the screen was blank.. Confused I removed the battery and fumbled around for a bit before realizing the battery had died. Wow. 8 hours of non use killed a 80% full battery.
Then the fun began, I tried connecting the phone to a wall charger and the phone would boot, try to turn on and die again. Thinking that the phone just needed to sit on the charger for a bit I left the phone for 30 minutes only to come back and see it was still in this boot cycle. I disconnected the battery and tried again, no luck.
I tried with my laptop sitll no luck. Finally it worked with my iPhone wall charger and microUSB plug..
Sometime during the day the UI crashed leaving me to reboot the phone. I just want one friggin day of hassle free phone usage!
I'm done tweaking UI settings and loading images and backing up and all of that jazz. I knew I had about a week of it in me and that's just about right. I ran into this same problem with my HTC phones. I would spend a week or so messing with the UI / roms etc, then just be done with it for a few months until I had the energy and cycles to start back up again.
Day 7
So my week with the Atrix is over.
There's definitely a lot of take aways I got out of spending a lot of time with Android.
1. Swype is pretty sweet. Once you get good at it and learn the tricks you can write long texts or emails with ease. Unfortunately it does have its pitfalls. The main one i noticed is typing long words. Maybe I'm swyping too fast but if I mess up a long word i usually have to delete the entire word and try swyping the whole thing over again, making it much slower than typing normally. I know that this really isn't an issue because you can switch keyboards on android to either style something you cannot do on iOS (for now)
2. The notification system on IOS is pretty janky. I'm loving the pulldown task bar and the non intrusive notifications. I have similar features with some jailbreak apps for the iPhone but none are quite as refined as the android system.
3. Try, try, try. You have to have a knack for tweaking and testing out new things for you to truly get it working right. One week was definitely not enough time for me to set everything up, but I would think in a month I could at least find all the tools to make the phone what i wanted. Getting them to all work together? Who knows...
4. Widgets! Amazing, a great way to get your information quickly and without having to open apps.
Although after a week I've decided that there are only a few main ones i need. E-mail, Calander, Weather, Time, Contacts, and ESPN.
5. The ugly stepchild of iOS. I truly feel that app developers design their apps for iOS first and then port them to android. Almost all the apps I use felt more refined and polished on the iPhone 4 than on my Atrix.
Apps meant for the rooted devices felt even LESS refined, almost as if they were commandline tools with buttons.
Overall I can see the positives of the phone and can fully understand why one could choose an Android phone over an iPhone. More selection in phones and features, more customizations, cheaper, and ties in really well with all the google products. Having all the acct information live in one place is nice too! No more logging in with the same userid / pass, is a huge timesaver.
Unfortunately for me I did not enjoy the downsides of the phone. Instability, widgets not working right, crashes with the Nav when I needed it. Poor Battery life. (I forgot to mention, I left my iPhone on the entire week I used the android and when I got back to it, I was still at 78% charge!!!) As much as I HATE HATE HATE itunes, it makes it so simple to get my media on and off the phone. It was too difficult to put aside.
I couldn't think of one thing that I had on the Atrix that would make it worth leaving the iPhone for. Although I could make the exact same case had this comparison been the other way around.
Rooted Atrix vs Jailbroken iPhone, this one is really tough. I think it depends on your patience and ability to deal with things not QUITE working right at all times. My patience is short and I've come to a point where a night tweaking a phone is a wasted night instead of a fun night. So I'm choosing the iPhone. For those with a lot more patience and willingness to tweak, I think the Android system is much more accesible and at some point your phone will be able to do everything an iPhone can and some. (aside from apps).
Welp, that's it for me! I'm going back to playing around with my rooted nook and enjoying my iPhone =)
Thanks for reading!
If you read this whole series, thank you 100x over and feel free to ask me questions!
