2011-09-08 From iPhone to Android

This is part 3 of my series where I document going from an iPhone to Android 2.3, running on the Samsung Galaxy Gio.

Previous time, I charged the phone with a cheap charger in my car and at home, which resulted in touchpad unresponsiveness, only to be fixed with a reboot. I suspect the chargers and started using only the Samsung-supplied charger and my PC for juice. We'll see.

I've also started using doubleTwist (yeah, lower "d") for syncing Music from my MacBook to my Samsung Gio. It works fine, but I'm missing some iTunes features. A really useful feature for iPhones and iPods with less than 16 Gb is the option "Convert higher bitrate songs to 128 kbps AAC". doubleTwist currently doesn't support downconverting (also called transcoding) music to a lower bitrate.

As for apps, I haven't really missed anything between my iPhone and my Samsung Gio. All the biggies are here; Facebook, Kindle, Skype, an RSS reader which syncs with Google Reader, a number of SimpleNote clients; all there. There's a couple of extra apps that aren't available on iPhone such as the official Google Reader App.

What's nice as well is that Android apps seem to be able to control the phone, more so than on the iPhone platform. For instance, there are apps that can control the screen brightness with a very wide range. Useful stuff.

The Android Market for apps seems to attract developers who aren't in it for the money. A decent SSH client (tool for IT system administrators) for example is ConnectBot, open source and completely free. The equivalent in the iOS AppStore is TouchTerm, which costs $4. Other app markets for Android seem to be popping up as well; for instance there's the Amazon app store (only available for US residents, unfortunately).