1582: My Phone’s Not Called “Mate”

So, an update on how I’m doing with my new phone after several days of fiddling around with it. (Said new phone, if you missed my post from the other day, is an HTC One M8 — my first Android phone, though not my first Android device.)

I’m really liking it! Like, way more than I thought I would. There are flaws, certainly — the phone has frozen and rebooted itself while I was in the middle of doing something rather more times than I would have preferred it to in the last few days — but on the whole, it’s been a great experience so far and I dare say that I am actually starting to prefer it to iOS.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to suddenly become an Android fanboy, largely because I find Android fanboys to be some of the most insufferable fanboys on the entire Internet. Nor do I feel that iOS is now “bad” because of the time I’ve spent with Android. But there are clear and discrete markets for both, and they both do their own thing extremely well.

iOS, like most of Apple’s other products these days, is designed to be accessible, simple and straightforward. I hesitate to say “designed for stupid people” but it’s certainly designed in such a manner that stupid people can’t break it easily. It doesn’t blind you with unnecessary information — if there’s something it can do quietly in the background without telling you what’s going on, it will. This is great for people who panic when they see technical messages they don’t understand; however, on the flip side, it’s less than ideal for computer-literate people who like to know what their device is up to — and if it’s up to something it shouldn’t be (or not up to something it should be).

There are two features on iOS where this is painfully apparent, and as I count myself in the more “computer literate” camp they’d been becoming increasingly frustrating to me.

First up is Photo Stream, a feature whereby you take a photo with the phone’s camera and it gets automatically backed up to your iCloud account and synced to any other devices you’ve also logged into iCloud with. This is, in theory at least, extremely useful for backing up images and just for transferring them from one device to another — from phone to computer, say — without having to faff around with long-winded sync processes or additional hardware. And, a good 90% of the time, it was great. The trouble was, for that remaining 10% of the time it would just not work, and it certainly wasn’t going to tell you why. I eventually managed to figure out that if Photo Stream wasn’t syncing it was generally for one of two reasons (the battery being below 20% or you not being connected to Wi-Fi) but the phone certainly didn’t tell me that.

iTunes Match, the service that allows you “cloud” access to your full iTunes music library from any device, is the same way. A few weeks back, my iPhone simply started refusing to download certain iTunes tracks to itself, which made loading it up with tunes to take on a long trip to be troublesome at best, completely impossible at worst. Again, there was no means of getting feedback on what was going wrong and why some tracks would download but others wouldn’t; it simply wouldn’t do it. Infuriating. But I can sort of understand why Apple chose not to put frightening error messages in there — so as not to scare off the casual, less computer-literate people.

Android’s big selling point is its customisability, and to be fair I haven’t explored that a great deal with my new device just yet — I’ve been largely happy with the stock options so far. It comes preloaded with a standard app launcher and a special “car mode” with big buttons and quick access to music, navigation and other useful features you might need while driving, but I know the option is there for further customisation. I also like how you can have things installed on the device but not visible on the home screen.

What I’ve really liked so far is the notifications system. I can clear all my notifications with a simple tap on a button, or I can also take action on a lot of them right from the notifications feed — reply to a tweet, archive an email, all manner of other things. It took a little adjusting to the fact that the phone doesn’t display messages on the home screen like the iPhone does, but having used it for a few days now, it’s actually quite nice to have the peace and be able to review notifications at your leisure rather than when your phone thinks you should.

Plus there’s the sound. I’m not normally a fan of playing music out of a mobile phone, but the M8 has some surprisingly competent speakers. They’re never going to rival a proper setup, of course, but they’re loud, reasonably beefy considering their size, and they make listening to music or podcasts without headphones while doing other things — housework, for example, or, more relevantly to now, packing — eminently practical. Combine with Google Music’s much better, more stable  implementation of “cloud music” than iTunes Match offers along with the ability to put an extra SD card in there for storage and you have a device that is a kick-ass media player as well as a solid communication device, too.

So I’m liking it a lot so far, and I’m certainly not missing my iPhone, which I gave to O2 for recycling in exchange for a little over a hundred quid — not to be sniffed at for minimum effort. Whether or not I’ll stick with Android in the long term remains to be seen, but frankly it’s looking quite positive right now.