My Week with the Atrix 4g.. Final

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!

My Week with the Atrix 4g... part 3

Day 4

ROOT ENABLED..

The one thing android and windows mobile were never short on was developers. I researched and read up on what it would take to root the Atrix the past few days and when I finally rebooted my mac into windows to root it. As I went back to xda-devlopers to download the files I found a new thread for mac developers! win..

Some new functionality

Root Explorer

Titanium Backup (going to test out the wifi one too)

Launcher Pro

Rather than install a custom rom, I decided to just hack my way through this one. I already have a nexus one with gingerbread rooted, and I'm not all that impressed with it so I didn't want to install that on the Atrix. I removed

all the default widgets, got rid of some other crufty at&t crap. And noticed little to no speedup.

At this point, I would not trust either my mom or dad to use this phone in this manner, we've gone out of the realm of consumer to the realm of prosumer.

I really do like the idea of Titanium Backup. This was one of my biggest pet peeves on windows mobile. I'd install a new rom and have to go through and re-install EVERYTHING on the phone. I haven't tried reflashing and using the restore mode yet, but if it does what it claims this is a huge win for android.

I still can't get ADWNotify to work and Launcher Pro doesn't show me the unread messages in a folder on the widget screens.

Day 5

So much fail.. so annoyed. Jury duty day.. I brought my Atrix and my iPad with me to sit around all day. I ended up reading magazines on the iPad most of the time (again, no zinio on android!!!)

I used google maps to navigate to the courthouse and it worked pretty well. I noticed that it was still in beta, but as-is the feature set was pretty complete and being that it is FREE on the android vs TomTom which costs $60 on the iPhone. I was mighty impressed. Until I tried to get home that is.. Android bugginess be DAMNED.

It's pouring rain and I'm in downtown oakland. I leave the garage to get signal and type in my address to get home. Google maps responds back to me with a blank screen. I give it some time and slow get back out to the main street. Still nothing. Close the app and try again.. NOTHING.. I'm now driving around in east oakland trying to find my way home and still the nav won't come up and won't even SHOW ME A MAP. WTF.

Luckily I have a pretty damn good sense of direction and was able to get myself to the main roads to get home. Had I not, this note may never have been written. Complete and utter FAIL.

This is what I mean when I say I expect things to work properly on my phone. Many people rely heavily on their smart phones to be smart. When I needed the phone to work properly and get me home it failed me. On a day to day basis all of the ESPN apps fail at one point or another, other apps lag or stall randomly, and I don't want to diagnose and fix each feature for the developers.

Apps fail and stall on the Iphone as well so don't get me wrong I expect this to happen. But with something like google maps which is built specifically for android phones and SHOULD work I expected much more. If google can't even get their own apps bug free how can they expect developers to do the same?

On a positive note, I'm beginning to love swype.. SO FAST....

Still, I have 2 days to work out the bugs and explore more of the unlocked potential of the phone.

My Week with the Atrix 4g... part 2

Day 2

Unlike most of the other days I just stuck the phone in my pocket on this day to see how my customizations worked and how I could use it on a day to day basis.

Bus ride -

Shit, I didn't install espn radio so I'm stuck listening to my personal music collection

Double Shit, I didn't put all my music on there since i was dragging and dropping so I'm stuck listening to a bunch of old music that put me to sleep on the bus. I need to find a way to sync iTunes.

Reception at work -

None.. further proof that the iPhone doest suffer the reception problems people so claim it to have. I was able to get text messages and edge reception at work. With the Atrix I get none.. bahhhh

Notification System -

It's good but still not perfect, much better than the iPhone notification system but I tend to look at notifications and ignore them till later, but I clear them out of the system. With iOS things like text messages and mail that I haven't read will still show up on the app that I haven't read them, whereas on Android they are just marked gone once I clear the notification. I forgot about a few texts and emails rather quickly. Ideally a hybrid of the two would be nice.

The widgets I thought were so cool are beginning to annoy me. Some crash, some involve me clicking into things so many times I might as well opened up the app directly. Fruststaiton is setting in.

Day 3

APPS... aaughhhh.. Why are some of the apps locked to the landscape mode? Almost all iPhone apps can be used in both portrait and landscape. This annoys me to no end. Both Amazon's barcode scanner and espn radio and locked to landscape mode. Everytime I had to scan something to check a price with amazon i had to turn the phone sideways then back upright to see the product listing.. poor ui design ...

I also added several apps today

iSync

slingplayer

espn radio

What I noticed is that espn radio is way behind version wise than the iOS version. This version is very buggy and cuts out a LOT. Similarly my google reader app continually locks up and then switches to different news articles and opens them in the browser so I have to go all the way back out to get to the right article.

Btw. I've also turned off live wallpapers since it was mentioned that it is a heavy cpu suck. I noticed minimal differences, and minimal stability increase. Also, after talking to a friend he mentioned that eliminating widgets would improve stability. my response? Fuck this. I'm going to use this phone as I would in real life and if the phone / os can't handle it properly they shouldn't have put it on in the first place. Live wallpapers are going back on.

This is one of the main things I hated about Windows Mobile. Install something, looks cool! YEA! Crash phone . SHIT ok try again. FUCK! reproduce problem. DAMNIT. remove from phone, and wait for the next version.

I never have to do this with my iPhone. something looks cool and I want to use it I use it and it works (unless I'm doing something in the jailbreak)

So here's my take on it right now. Unjailbroken iPhone to unrooted Android. the Iphone wins.. period.. more stable, just works and I'd use it day to day.. But you have 5 more days and you've made your decision already you say..

Well not exactly..

Tonight.. WE ROOT..

custom roms here I come...

My Week with the Atrix 4g.. part 1

I gave the android the ole college try and put down my iPhone 4 for a week to try and get a grasp of the Android.

Day 0. I'm not counting this as a day because I decided I can't honestly imagine an Android phone equalling my 3 years with the iPhone right away. I spent most of this day downloading as many of the same applications I have on my iPhone on the Atrix and setting up the wallpaper / widgets / accts etc etc.

Some quick disappointments of missing apps:

Zinio (this one is rather huge)

Netflix ( I can live with that)

Starbucks card (whaaa)

Things I didn't install:

TomTom (too cheap to repay $60 for that when google maps does turn by turn)

Day 1. I'm currently just dragging and dropping music into an SD card as well as my other media... I've read about some apps that can sync your iTunes library, which would be very helpful. Currently the syncing aspect of media is a huge negative. As much as I HATE iTunes, it makes putting specific music on my iPhone / iPad so much easier. Specifically I remove and add music depending on where I'm going because sometimes I need more space fo videos than music etc etc. I can't imagine doing that right now..

Widgets!! Alright these are fucking cool. Apple needs to get us widgets on the iPhone. The one annoying thing I have about widgets is that you have to lock them in a grid style. some of the widgets use up a LOT of negative space which annoys me to no end.. I'm wasting space where I can put more information!!! The inflexibility of some of the other widgets annoys me as well. I can see myself fiddling with these for months on end to get the right setup.

gMail.. yes.. this is good (although in my search for android apps I actually found out you can install some android apps on the iphone so I might have to hack this one onto my iPhone)

Fingerprint ID.. Holy moly this thing is sweet!!! Unlock your phone with a swipe of your fingertip? Awwweeeesome..

I know a lot of other androids don't have this, but it's definitely a plus for the atrix.

Screen.. Very sharp, very bright.. I'm getting an antiglare screen cover so I'll comment on that more when it comes in.

Quirks? Sometimes when I type there is still a lot of lag or misinterpretation of the keys. I was pretty surprised as the screen is a little larger than the iPhone.. Also, it feels like I hit the wrong keys a lot more than I do on the iPhone. Maybe the antiglare screen will help?

Stalling Apps.. I've had a lot of apps stall or die on me mid stream. the main mail client, nook, im+, dropbox, facebook.

Not sure what the deal is here.

Live wallpaper! - very cool.. I have it set right now so let's see how battery life does (although the atrix does have a HUGE battery.

Speed - I actually did this test on day 0 with the iphone but the iphone actually got faster than the atrix... Thanks at&t for a fake shitty ass 4g!

Opening my heart to Android (maybe)

Congratulations google you finally got me.

Honeycomb is awesome.. Or is it?

I was sitting there on the bus today with my honeycomb'd nook color (HNC) going wow, I'd check my emails on this, read some news stories, check sport scores. Why have I never done this with my iPad? I've taken the ipad on the bus with me so many more times, even tethered it at times to watch basketball on my slingbox. But I've never sat down with it, read emails, opened up safari and hung out on facebook.

Maybe it's because to HNC is new and I'm still learning it, but I believe it is so much more. The iPad is great, for the past year on vacation I've watched movies, read magazines and played games. Only today I realized, I don't need iOS to do any of these things. The iPad to me has always been a giant iPhone, and maybe because I looked at it that way that I used it as such. So instead of reaching for my ipad I always reached for my iPhone. It's smaller just as fast and I get the same job done. Over the past month I've been hacking the beejeebus out of my iPad, trying to get more use out of it, adding more features, playing with all the settings. Today I realized what I was doing, in the same way I spent all those years sifting through smart phones wanting something MORE, I wanted something more from my iPad.

I don't want a giant iPhone. I want a tablet! Something that makes me differentiate one tool from another. The HNC gives that to me now (it's still not perfect). That being said, the ipad is much more refined and user friendly than the honeycomb interface. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone not technically inclined. But what this means for ME (being selfish here) is that when the next iPad does come around, unless apple decides to truly split up iOs for phone and ipad (not gonna happen) I probably will end up spending my $800+ on an Android Tablet.

1. Because I give enough money to apple every year

2. Because I want something unique that I will use everyday instead of just traveling

3. Because the iPad just isn't special enough for me.

4. Because everything I use the iPad for I can do with any other tablet (Android, webOs, RIM?!?!)

There.. I've said it..

This weekend i'm testing out an atrix 4g phone so we'll see if I can migrate my ass over to a gPhone too...