Jumping Ship from iPhone to Android: A Switcher’s Guide (Lifehacker)

Yesterday, the early reviewers raved.  The public has “sniff[ed] out a winner” … the display is “gorgeous” … it’s a “major leap” … it was simply so awesome, that David Pogue of the New York Times asked, “What’s the point [of this review]?“  Turns out, the point was to ensure that Apple keeps advertising its products in the New York Times.  Because the real reviews started coming in shortly after people started turning their phones on, holding them in their hands, and looking at their screens.

Mashable sums it up: Critical iPhone 4 Issues and Complaints Are Mounting.  This story currently has about 2,500 tweets and 1,500 Facebook shares.  And the complaints are against both the iPhone 4′s major strength and its major weakness.

The iPhone 4 had one thing going for it: pixels.  “Retina” display is the one thing no Android device has responded to (yet).  Sure, nearly every Android phone has a higher resolution display than the 3Gs, but the iPhone 4 beats them all … but it has yellow spots.

Then there was the iPhone’s weakness: AT&T.  Everybody whines about poor coverage, dropped calls, and weak data service already.  How could it get worse?  Well, put your iPhone 4 in your hand and watch the bars drop.  The solution so far?  Use the headphones or buy a rubberized case.  Goodbye sleek design.

Oh well, it had to happen … putting all your eggs in one basket an all that.  That only works with late-night television.

People will say the iPhone 3Gs was old at that point and all the new, sexy phones had Android. And I say: EXACTLY!  Apple’s one-size-fits-all models (updated every two years) isn’t going to work in the long run.  When it was G1 vs. iPhone, yes, Apple won.  But now there are too many good phones available on better networks, and they are tailored to better-fit different segments of the market.

And others will ignore the fact that Wal-Mart was selling off iPhones for the bargain-basement price of $97.  All while Verizon was selling the Droid Eris for $0.01 and offering other 2-for-1 incentives.  Apple can’t compete on price with Android, just like they couldn’t with Windows a few decades ago.

Steve, you had a good run.  But it’s done.

iPhone buyers aren’t going to break their contracts and buy this lower-end phone.  We all know that.  But as the iPhone market goes down-market to build its customer base, cheaper Android phones are going to be a major hurdle.  Why buy the $200 iPhone with 2-year contract and $110/month plan when you can get an Android phone for a fraction of that price (especially if the Android plan includes unlimited data)?  Apple is a one-phone, one-carrier operation.  LG is planning to release 20 Android handsets this year.  There are already Android phones on every major carrier.  This is what Apple is up against.  They can’t win.

It’s the Windows battle all over again.  Apple can win the first few clashes as the fight begins, but once the swarm starts, there’s no way for the closed system to triumph.  The iPhone was able to beat the G1, but it’s got no chance against the Incredible, EVO, Droid, Nexus One, i1, MyTouch, Zio, etc.  The iPhone era is ending.  Retina display isn’t going to save it.

photo credit: Mads Boedker

Face it — Android has all the good buzz.  It used to be the OS defined by what it lacked — multi-touch.  Now it’s the OS with Flash, it’s “open,” and every major manufacturer has a badass phone in the works.  But it won’t be the super phones like the HTC Evo and Droid Incredible that bury Apple — it’ll be the simpler ones, the phones that are good enough.  It will be the Kyocera Zio.

This thing is supposed to be $200 unsubsidized.  That’s insane — 1/2 to 1/3 the price of other smartphones (Google’s Nexus One is $530).  And if it gets on Boost Mobile, watch out.  $50-60 a month is pretty damn attractive — $1,400-1,640 total cost over 2 years compared to $2,500-3,800 for a higher-end phone.  Seriously, cue the iPhone exodus.

And yeah, you can whine about the specs — it IS a cheaper phone.  But it has the same processor speed as the formerly top-of-the-line iPhone 3Gs — 600MHz — and it has a higher resolution screen.  Yes, you will need to buy a big micro SD card to hold all your songs, but, unlike the iPhone, you can replace its battery.  And yeah, you can complain about running Android 1.6, but the user of this phone is either too novice to care about OS fragmentation or savvy enough to upgrade it on his own.  It’s truly good enough, and it will be revolutionary.

Apple is going to hate this phone.

photo credit: mac morrison

The prepaid market lines up much better with Google’s approach to selling phones.  Prepaid customers already purchase unsubsidized phones, and there’s currently no prepaid phone running Android available in the US.  This is about to change (probably) with Motorola’s i1, but that phone is a lower-end device.

But the prepaid market has a social stigma — these customers are less desirable to mobile phone carriers because they are not locked in.  They can change their plans at any time, switch carriers easily, and spend as little as a few dollars a month.  Because of these factors, the prepaid market is filled with sub-par phones.  Which makes it the perfect market for the Nexus One.

1. Add this line of code to the HEAD of your HTML page.  Be sure to grab the code appropriate to the font you want.  This example uses Droid Sans.
2. Reference the font name in the font stack wherever you want to use the Google web font (ex: font-family: ‘Droid Sans’, Verdana …).  In my case, I applied it to the entire page.

The only thing I don’t like is the font shift when the page loads for the first time.  This plagues all replacement techniques, but Google’s caches well and doesn’t seem to affect subsequent visits.  In my experience, the sIFR solution shifts on every page load which is a deal-breaker.

photo credit: Sunfox

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Here’s why:

As a sales story, the Google’s Nexus One was not a success.  It just isn’t selling much (full disclosure: I have one).  And while sales numbers were probably not the primary reason Google built the thing, there’s a lot to learn from the experiment.

Android phones are selling very well.  The current best selling Android device is the Motorola Droid on Verizon (I like the cheaper, keyboard-free Droid Eris and the new HTC Incredible).  The Droid’s ad campaign made the phone cool.  You can pull it out in a bar, and the person next to you will know what it is and hopefully be of the opposite sex and hopefully want to sleep with you.  That’s what good advertising campaigns accomplish … more or less. The Nexus One’s online-only campaign didn’t accomplish this on the same scale as the Droid’s television campaign.

But as advertising campaigns, both have been tremendously nerdy.  They have focused on specs and megapixels and functionality.  The next campaign  needs to focus on Apple’s stronghold: design.  Which brings us to Frank.

Apple customers (at least all the Apple customers I know) think of themselves as design aficionados.  They get hot dreaming about Herman Miller chairs and concrete and steel architecture.  Their phone is an extension of their design sensibilities — like the mock turtlenecks they all wear.  Google needs to exploit this motivator as well.  It’s not just about features.

Picture this: Frank Gehry sitting in his sweeping stainless steel bandshell in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  He says something like this: “Open design is the best design.  A designer must allow others to participate in his sculpture — to play symphonies in his space.  And only by peeling back layers of distraction and excess,  can we can appreciate true elegance.  I’m Frank Gehry, and I use Android.”

photo credit: Sweet One

It’s an attack on all things Apple without being an explicit attack on Apple (unlike the Droid’s “iDon’t” campaign).  And it will give the person next to you at the bar a reason to recognize your phone and want to sleep with you.

photo credit: magic_quote

The story is just too far fetched.  A drunk drops his phone, won’t return any calls, then the phone finds its way to Gizmodo.  Bullshit.  Here’s why:

1. Apple’s iPad buzz is dead and it needed to get back in the headlines.  There was a lot of hype before everybody tried the thing out, but that’s gone.  It’s a big iPod Touch.  We all realize that.  Sure, a lot of suckers bought it, but the revolution didn’t come.  But perhaps that’s because we’re not sitting close enough to the WiFi.
2. The iPhone allure is dying.  Apple’s products attempt to be luxury, high-end devices (so Apple can charge more).  That gimmick doesn’t work when everybody has one.  If the iPhone is supposed to be the phone of the savvy and successful, you can’t put it in the hands of a Domino’s delivery driver.
3. The iPhone OS 4 announcement fell flat.  Wallpapers and multi-tasking?  That’s so Android 2.1.  Get with it, Apple.  When it was first released, the iPhone was a revolutionary device, but since then the updates have been incremental and boring.  Mostly because …
4. Apple can’t compete with HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, etc. all at once.  They competition is just putting phones out too fast for Apple to respond.  Every phone starting with the Motorola Droid has had better specs than the iPhone 3Gs.  Hell, Verizon’s HTC Droid Eris is just as good and $0.01 on Amazon.  HTC alone has released a half-dozen phones in the last few months, all of them more impressive than the 3Gs, and Apple has announced nothing except wallpapers and fake multi-task.  Apple just can’t keep up because …
5. The burden of the closed system is starting to crush Apple.  The backlash is mounting and it’s just not going to work out in their favor (just like last time when Apple tried this fight with Windows).  Jobs can say that he’s keeping the walls around iTunes to keep out the porn, but that’s a lie.  The walls are up so that Apple makes more money.  And it’s not just the phone and the OS that are strangling Apple.
6. It’s the network.  A T&T has taken too many hits  for it to recover.  It’s bloodied and wounded and Apple can’t afford to be tied to it any longer, but because AT&T subsidies are so lucrative, Apple has overstayed its welcome and screwed its customers in its own self interest.  The customer base is ripe for rebellion.

So, long story short, Google Android is catching up.  Their growth rate is phenomenal (their market share more than doubled from 11/09-02/10).  The phones running Android are impressive and feature-rich and are found on Verizon’s huge and Sprint’s super-fast networks.  On top of that, they are cheaper.  Price, flexibility, and choice are all stacked against Apple.  They’ve lost this battle before, and their leaked phone ploy shows they realize that they’re losing it again.