Dear Android and pals, you’re making me crave my iPhone again…
I was an Apple guy for along time, unabashedly so. Then a few months back I switched to Android. And its been a fun and rewarding journey.
But now I’m getting more and more frustrated with each passing day with the instability of the device, which I think is a combination of the OS + apps with less restrictions + whatever software Samsung crammed on the device. At least five times a day the device locks up and I have to wait 10 to 15 seconds for it to wake back up. And I probably have to (or should) restart the phone every day.
Now, if I was having this experience in 2006, I wouldn’t even think twice about it. What I just described is pretty much every Windows users’ experience in the mid-2000’s (and maybe still today). But in 2007 I switched to both a Mac and an iPhone. And I NEVER have experiences like this on Apple devices.
Let me be clear about that. I haven’t had to restart my MacBook Pro in months. Actually I can’t even remember the last time I had to do that but my memory is only good enough to know I haven’t done it in months. And with the iPhone, especially the iPhone 5, I never had lag or screen freezes. Never.
And I’m using the top-of-the-line, fresh off the assembly line, in all the commercials newest Android device, the Samsung Galaxy S4. And I love this device!
But I’m not sure how much longer I can stand these current issues. This weekend I was trying to quickly capture a photo of a baby deer that I saw as in the mountains and the camera function locked up and after ten seconds of glaring angrily (but silently) at the phone it woke back up just as the deer ran off. And yesterday Google Maps froze for a few seconds just as I was trying to figure out if I was supposed to go left or right on a street (I guessed correctly). And my favorite is when someone calls me, I swipe to answer and it shows that I’ve answered and the phone just keeps ringing and eventually goes to voicemail, now matter how hard I press every button and every part of the screen.
I suppose there is hope that when Google does their own version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that it won’t have these issues because it won’t have all the Samsung software loaded on it. I didn’t have these issues on the Nexus 4 Google Edition. But if this continues much longer I’m fairly sure I’ll give up all the things I like about Android and switch back to iOS, at least until the others guys can get their sh&t together.
You mean “Dear Samsung”, right? Why blame Android for Samsung crapping it up? And yes, there will be a “stock” Galaxy S4, I’m waiting for the Active version.
I do think most of the blame probably rests on Samsung, which is why I said “and pals” and later said it was probably a combo of Android + apps + Samsung. So I assume its Samsung crapping it up but its hard to tell. A friend of mine has the same phone but its on AT&T (I’m on Verizon) and he has no issues.
I guess the point is, “something” is making the experience almost unacceptable for me, and the only entity at the center of that is Android and my hope is that they somehow start trying to enforce at least some restrictions or policies to the manufacturers and the app developers to lessen their chances of f’ing up what otherwise should be a great experience.
Bummer for me is that it looks like the Google edition of the S4 isn’t going to be on Verizon and in Atlanta, I’m almost unwilling to go back to AT&T.
tl;dr I don’t know what’s wrong so I’m going to blame Android :-)
If it makes you feel batter, Samsung has the exact same problem when the S3 came out. They did an OS update and since then I’ve not had a single incidence of the phone hanging. My guess is the same thing will occur with the S4.
Welcome back to reality Jeff. Suddenly those iphone vs android usage numbers make total sense, huh?
I want all the freedom of changing my dialer, my launcher, my core phone features. I want the ability for multiple hardware vendors to try different device formats… Not really sure why your phone is hanging but I suspect TouchWiz (Samsung) is not baked quite yet on the S4, but ultimately I think Android will always be a little less stable than an iPhone (though shouldn’t be as bad as you have had it this past week).
Of course a person using an Android phone should expect to have a stable device, and as they become more of a power user and swap in and out of different apps that replace core functionality they should get a progressively less stable but more customized device.
Freedom has costs though and you can get yourself in trouble with an Android device, I would factory reset it and re-get your apps via Google Play which should take care of things for now until Samsung sends there update out that they always get around to doing.
I for one will only use stock Nexus devices :-) Best of both worlds of iPhone and Android where I get my ideal mix of stability and freedom.
…and an unusable camera. That’s a deal breaker for me with the current Nexus, because, you know, I like how my kids look ;)
Totally agree on that – I miss not having a high quality camera on the Nexus 4 much more than I miss the lack of LTE data speed on it. Debating now between stock S4 and stock HTC One which both start shipping late next week. I figure the “battle” between high end iPhone and Android phones will be tipped in the favor of the high end Android phones until the IPhone 6 comes out and probably makes the screen size thing a non issue.
Can’t wait to see what Google does with their future Motorola phones – Samsung needs some quality Android competition to make them improve their build quality and proprietary software layer.
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