I am a self-loathing Apple fan. Self-loathing because I hate that I am dependent on a single company. Hanging by its keynotes. Refreshing Apple.com, hoping for new cheer. Dependence. I hate it! Even if it is on the Infinite Loop; the warm, friendly, gratifying and congenial Cult of Mac; the charming, agreeable, glowing Apple…YUP. HATE IT!
So I’ve made several attempts to ditch my iPhone. This involved two Symbians, one Android (now two) and even a Windows Mobile. (What? I worked for ole’ Softy back in the day. Anyway…)
My last attempt at venturing into Androidome lasted all of six weeks. And even though I know this trip will probably be a great deal shorter, with the iPhone 5′s release just around the corner, I’m jotting down the reasons why I actually am enjoying this turn on the Android platform. Mainly to spite an old friend who sold me his Samsung Galaxy S2 for dirt cheap as a way of taunting me. Here’s telling you! Oh, and…thanks again, dude. You really did me a solid!
1) Google Music + Spotify – Media consumption was a huge problem for me back in the days of FroYo. The largest MicroSD card I could get was 8GBs and with my Apps and Docs already vying for the little space it had, I felt like I was back to picking music for a Creative Nomad II.
This time, with Google Music’s and Spotify’s betas installed, I was able to start streaming and caching music from the cloud without ever having to hook my device up to a computer. A good thing too since Samsung’s Kies doesn’t support Apple’s Lion. But who needs a desktop app or driver when you’re living off the Cloud?
2) Amazon’s App Store - I’ll brace myself for the hate mail as I publish these words: I loathe the Android Marketplace!
As an editor I value curation. How could Google – of all companies – put together a junk yard of a store with a search engine and recommendation system that is as much help as Mariah Carey at the movies?
In comes Bezos (I’d keep an eye on him, Schmidt) with an Android app store run the way Google should have run their’s from the start.
I’m now able to find useful apps that…well…that nothing; freggin’ useful apps on the Android!
How did Google manage to serve up five separate desert-named helpings of their OS without improving their Marketplace search? Thank God for Bezos!
3) Gingerbread’s UI improvements - This may seem like a small thing to programmers and Linux fans who, like Neo, see the world in code. I. Am. Not. The. One. I can’t see past no cookie or spoon. It has got to look nice, for me to pick it up twice. You dig? ‘Nuff said.
4) Audible and The Economist for Android - I spend most of my time at work reading. From articles to legal agreements; from short memos to lengthy emails. I will never tire of the written word, but have come to love Audible and the digital edition of the Economist as they fill me up on nights when my eyes have had enough but my mind’s still pacing.
Even before Audible built ‘an app for that’, the iOS supported its audiobooks natively. But my FroYo device needed a third-party app to authenticate and unlock my Audible files; a third party app that I could never get to work.
2011′s Android has all of this in hand, along with a series of other native apps for The Economist, This American Life and TWiT. Amazon’s Appstore also hosts a number of podcast managers worth checking out.
Never realized, until this moment, that I might have a thing for spoken word.
5) Photo fun - Just a year ago the iOS had three photo apps for every one on Android (not intended to be a factual statement; Planned Parenthood, holla!), but the Amazon Appstore is now teeming with editing, panorama-snapping, social-feature-having photo apps, making any Android device with a camera as great to shoot on as the iPhone.
There you have it. Five reasons why I am enjoying my Android device more, this time around.
I’m still buying the iPhone 5, mind you. Or the 4S. Or, man, whatever the hell Forestall, Cook or Schiller decide to unveil on October 5th. But at least I sampled something else. At least I tried a reasonably priced device that gave me exactly what I was looking for. Before ultimately returning to the abusive, co-dependent, gold digging relationship I’ve been in for the past four years. Why? Because Apple has the unadulterated sex appeal of Katy Perry sitting in a giant tub of Ben & Jerry’s.
And. F*ck. Android, you just can’t compete with that! No one can.