Why I Miss My iPhone, By Former Apple Genius [Spoiler: Android Is Crap]

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The future for Android

This is a guest post by the author of the controversial CrApple Store blog, written by a former Apple Genius. [More on the CrApple Store here]

If you can cast your minds back 10 years, you might remember the slight excitement of getting a new mobile phone.

Features like a colour screen, customisable ringtones, a camera and games were all part of the learning experience that came along with obtaining a new handset year after year.

In recent years I’ve found this geek factor to be missing from the yearly iOS update (same phone, same-ish software and settings), and with the signal/bumper fiasco with this year’s iPhone, I decided that having to have a case on a phone I just paid £500 was not acceptable.

Along with Apple’s childish behaviour of putting up videos of other manufacturers’ handsets supposedly doing a similar thing, I thought enough was enough and decided to return my iPhone 4 for a full refund. Also not happy with paying hundreds of pounds for last year’s 3GS model, I thought what better opportunity than to dip my toe into the Android platform, and see what, at least some of the fuss was about.

Now, every day I regret the purchase of an Android handset.

My biggest gripe with Android is, well just all around it appears to be, well, shit. I opted for a budget handset, the LG GT540/Optimus, at a mere £100.

It has a (resistive, think DS) touch screen, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and all the mod cons which made £100 look like a steal. While some of my issues may be the LG software (I believe whilst still running Android, manufacturers can put their own cameras apps etc on the device), it just falls a thousand miles short of even the original iPhone.

Onscreen buttons in the camera overlap so you can’t press what’s behind it, error messages about processes not responding come up all the time, the GPS takes at least 10 minutes to find where you are, the built in Mail app is terrible, it’s been a ball-ache to get it to talk to mac… I could go on.

If I want to put a new album on the music player, I honestly get stuck with wondering what will take the least about time between connecting the USB cable, Bluetoothing the files or setting up an FTP server on it. I’ve struggled to find why anyone would say it’s better than the iPhone, I can only imagine it has something to do with being about to download files from a website, and then open them (which I’m pretty sure with a free app, I could do on my old iPhone).

Working at a CrApple Store, a few of us had Android phones and people were surprised that with me being one of the biggest iPhone haters of them all, I began to miss it so dearly. They blame my cheap, inferior budget handset for the problems I’m having, but my issue with that is: if it isn’t going to run properly, don’t put it on there.

You can talk about open source all you like, but it seems that Google have no pride in their operating system. It seems they’re happy to have it running on any piece of shit hardware, just to have a larger install base.

The same can be seen with these new £100 tablets you see doing the rounds in catalogues and supermarkets that just don’t work. The whole experience reminds me of why I hate Windows so much, and why I decided to by my first Mac all those years ago.

At least with the iPhone you know it’s going to sync properly with your computer, the apps you download are gong to fit the screen properly and more than 9 times out of 10 work as they should, and also have a certain polish to them.

The best thing about my Android handset?

I get a huge satisfaction of watching it explode into three pieces when I throw against a wall in utter frustration.

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