Holiday Movie Power Rankings

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I don’t have as much time to watch movies as I once did, but when I was younger the holiday season was filled with tons of Christmas movies that you could only watch for about one month a year. Whenever you turned on the TV you’d catch at least some holiday special or Christmas classic on the air and it’s just another part of the holiday season that I love so much. There’s a pretty short list of movies that I look forward to watching ever year, and do my best to watch all of these every year as I gear up for St. Nick’s visit.

10. White Christmas
A sentimental favorite at best. This movie is corny but it reminds me of my childhood and has all of the classic cheeseball 50s Christmas tunes we all know (and sometimes love).

9. Bad Santa
Nice to throw in a raunchy movie to the mix, and this movie is obviously that. Once the initial “oh my god it’s Christmas season” excitement wears off and you want to watch something a bit less corny, this movie does the trick in spades.

8. It’s a Wonderful Life
Another sentimental favorite, this is the sort of thing I like to watch on Christmas Eve before going to sleep.

7. Scrooged
I love Bill Murray, even in below-average movies.

6. Home Alone
A childhood favorite that has held up ok over time.

5. Die Hard
Obviously not thought of when one is listing out Christmas movies, but it’s hard to pass up this classic, and it’s a nice break from the standard Christmas movie rotation.

4. Elf
An instant classic. I tend to watch this on Thanksgiving night after everyone has gone home. Will Ferrell at his loud and ridiculous finest.

3. A Christmas Story
Obviously, you can’t escape this movie even if you wanted to. Still, Christmas Eve and day are always filled with this fantastic movie.

2. Planes Trains and Automobiles
I love watching this movie on Thanksgiving day or before. There aren’t many Thanksgiving movies that I’m aware of so this one kind of wins by default – but it doesn’t hurt that it’s a fantastic movie after all these years.

1. Christmas Vacation
Unbeatable. Some of my favorite holiday movies hold up regardless of season, and this is no exception.

Honorable Mentions:
Trading Places, Lethal Weapon, Gremlins, Nightmare Before Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street

Album that represents a year of my life

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I was recently thinking about what albums “defined” years of my life and quickly came up with the following list.

Doesn’t mean it was even the best album of that year (or that it even came out that year). What it does mean is that’s the album that reminds me of a certain year of my life. Some embarrassing ones, but mostly fairly expected stuff.

1993: Nevermind
1994: Siamese Dream
1995: Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness
1996: Energy/Somery
1997: Everything Sucks
1998: Stranger than Fiction
1999: Things Fall Apart
2000: Reflection Eternal
2001: 2001
2002: OK Computer
2003: Figure 8/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2004: The Moon & Antarctica
2005: In Motion
2006: Frances the Mute
2007: Wincing the Night Away
2008: Vampire Weekend
2009: Noble Beast
2010: The Suburbs
2011: Little Hell
2012: SBTRKT
2013: Because the Internet

The State of the Streaming Union

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Lately, I’ve grown tired of the HTML5/Flash based nature of Rdio, despite all of the other things that I love about the service. The desktop ‘app’ is basically a wrapper app for the website so that you can use the media keys, but is otherwise a webpage. Right clicking and selecting ‘reload’ is a dead giveaway. HTML5/Flash certainly has its benefits – it allows for quick, platform-agnostic iteration and that’s huge for a company like Rdio, who is outgunned a bit by Spotify and now Beats. However, I decided to stray out to Spotify land to see how green the grass is these days. I left fairly impressed.

At this point, I think that Rdio has put all of its chips in the consistent web-style direction and the technical debt they’ve incurred thus far might do them in. The future are native apps everywhere that use a unified API (which I’m sure they have on some level, but even their mobile apps make heavy use of webviews), and relying on Flash on the desktop is a throwback to 5 years ago. While that’s all architecture talk at this point, the fact that it was bothering me helped nudge me to give Spotify a try and I’m glad that I did. I learned a lot about what other services have to offer.

In fact, once Apple announced they were buying Beats, the maker of the overpriced headphones and the fledgling streaming music service, I decided to take a trial run of that as well to see what the future looks like according to Apple & Beats. I was surprised by some of the features and it really made me rethink what I like about any streaming service.

Devices used: iPad mini, iPhone 5s, iMac, and MacBook Air.

Design

I feel like this is an area that Rdio was leaps and bounds ahead of the others on until recently, but as of late I’m not so sure who leads the pack. Spotify recently went through a redesign that unifies their product offering but it’s very skin deep – they put a pretty coat of paint on things, but it feels overly complicated at times, isn’t easily scannable, and the way the apps ‘work’ don’t make a lot of sense to me at times. However they did manage to close the gap in the aesthetic side of the design and I think it’s a wash between the three services at this point. Why is that? I think each one has it’s own personality and there are UX issues on any of the platforms, so it’s hard to pick a winner. Rdio does a great job of making artwork come to the forefront and keep buttons and UI elements out of the way for the most part, with a clear navigation hierarchy in all of their apps. However, the web-ness of their apps come through, so I ding Rdio for UX reasons. Everything is kind of slow and doesn’t quite feel right at times, despite looking great and being logically organized. Beats has a very strong design as well, but sometimes navigation can be clumsy in their mobile applications. However, awful icon aside I think that Beats might have the best foundation to build on. The user experience in their apps is really solid, which I’ll detail more below.

Winner: Beats

Curation

This term is getting overused but one of the things that does set Beats apart are their ‘influencer’ created playlists and the recommendation engine that suggests playlists to you based on what you like or have listened to. At first I didn’t think I’d see much value but over the past week I’ve grown to appreciate some of the great lists that have been recommended based on either an artist (for example, Talking Heads: Deep Cuts was suggested after I listened to a Talking Heads album) or a genre (90s Suburbia, a playlist with tons of grunge hits, was recommended after I listened to Alice in Chains). These all show up in a ‘Just for you’ section that loads when the app fires up and it keeps you listening to new stuff. The fact that beats allows you to ‘love’ or ‘hate’ any song or playlist further helps their recommendation engine, and over time it’s almost eerie how good the suggestions are.

Spotify has a similar feature, but they recommend artists and songs more than playlists. This works quite well, but most of the playlists Spotify promotes are 200-song monstrosities that are just a collection of every song that fits a certain category. While this is good for an all-day cookout or something like that, it doesn’t really get as specific as something like Beats does, which is offer up very focused playlists (one of my favorites so far is ‘Best of Chipmunk Soul’, which if you don’t know is what some call the early 2000s Kanye West style of sped up soul samples in songs) which are maybe 10-20 songs long. Spotify still does a good job of suggesting music I might like and I’m usually agreeing with what they have to offer.

Rdio has a recommendation feature but it’s kind of buried and the suggestions are very programatic. I rarely use it and I’m sure most folks feel the same way. Most music discovery on Rdio is via the ‘Heavy Rotation’ feature, that allows music your friends are loving to bubble up. It works pretty well if you follow the right people, but it’s a different approach. Your best bet for discovering music on Rdio is listening to the you.FM feature, which plays a custom radio station based on your collection and listening habits.

Winner: Beats

Playlist / music management

Rdio wins this category, but it’s basically a toss up between all 3 services. On Rdio’s desktop app and the mobile app, you can select to add a song/album to your library, sync it to your mobile device, or add it to a playlist. One of the best things about Rdio is that you can manage what is on your mobile device from anywhere – this doesn’t sound like a useful feature until you try the way that others handle it. If you choose to sync a song to mobile from the desktop, it will do that the next time you open any of your mobile apps. Another great feature is in the way Rdio allows you to add songs to a playlist from the actual list view. A search box exists that allows you to type in a track name and the result will be added to your list if you select it. Great if you’re taking a lot of random requests for a playlist and want to quickly assemble a track listing. The biggest issue again comes from the fact that Rdio uses a lot of webviews. You can’t select or edit multiple songs in a playlist. Drag and drop is slow and just plain clumsy. Other than that, it’s the best for managing music and playlists.

Spotify has its ups and downs – it’s difficult to know what songs are queued to play, and how to save a song for offline playback. If you search for an artist or song and land on the album that way on your phone, you’re unable to sync for offline. If you go through your ‘collection’ you can sync but the iconography is very hard to see. Spotfiy does make it easy to add songs to a playlist or your collection, though. Same for quickly jumping to the artist page or the album page. This is helpful for if you’re going through a long playlist and want to jump to the album the song is from. I also particularly like how you can use a search box to filter an existing playlist to find a certain song. Since everything is “native” the speed to edit playlists is the fastest of the bunch. Recently Spotify added the ability to filter by offline and alphabetical within your library listings, which is huge for mobile usability. This finally brings them on par with the others and for me makes using the mobile app a viable option, despite it being solid in most other ways to begin with.

Beats is really solid on the mobile front – there are filters to see what songs are on your mobile vs your entire collection, and it’s easy to add songs to a playlist, to your collection, or add to your mobile device for offline playback. However, the offline config is a on a per-device basis so you can’t get the benefit of Rdio’s universal management.

Winner: Rdio

Personalization

Rdio allows you to build custom stations and also provides you with a you.FM feature that is a station built on your tastes and listening habits. In fact, all radio stations allow you to customize on a sliding scale from ‘popular’ to ‘adventurous’ which allows you to specify exactly what you want to hear.

Beats learns your history and suggests albums and playlists you’d like, and the recommendations are really solid.

Spotify offers a similar approach to what Beats does, but it offers a few nice touches that put it above the others. When you see recommendations, it offers up why it is suggesting the artist as well as a very quick way to add the song or album to your collection, as well as play the item.

Winner: Spotify

Desktop app

Spotify wins this round mainly because it’s the only one with a true desktop client. Everything is fast, track lists pop into place and dragging and dropping is snappy. Songs are cached for offline playback automatically as well as giving the user the option to cache specific playlists or albums for offline, just like the mobile clients.

Rdio’s is a good app but it’s essentially a web player wrapped in a native client. It does everything the website does, only it can respond to system keys like play/pause, which is nice. It’s simply slower than a native app, especially when editing playlists or loading lots of content. Dragging and dropping feels clunky (as it’s web based), and basically it’s just a really good web app. Unfortunately, that’s not what people want. Overall, performance on Rdio’s desktop app is pretty poor, and I have no confidence that they’ll ever get away from the web-based model. It’s a shame too, as a native Rdio app that did the exact things that the web version does right now would be unbeatable by the competition.

Beats … they only have a web player and it lacks almost all of the features you’d expect it to have – it’s nowhere near on par with their excellent mobile clients nor does it even have the basics of the other competitors’ web offerings. It feels very rushed and I hope it gets addressed with a true native app eventually (I can see Apple influencing this, as they think of ‘the cloud’ as a conduit for native apps to talk to each other, instead of web-based services). It currently never remembers my login, it takes 10 seconds to add a song to my library, and the connection is frequently lost. They need to up their desktop game, and fast.

Winner: Spotify

Mobile features

I use the mobile app for whichever service I choose a ton, and as such I have some fairly specific things I look for:

  • Offline sync
  • Filtering lists
  • Searching lists
  • Sort by play count or recently added
  • Speed of adding, finding albums
  • Ease of use while driving
  • Background sync

Each of the 3 major clients I tried offer their own take and have strengths and weaknesses, but Spotify comes out ahead (barely).

Spotify allows for offline sync (up to 3,333 tracks!) and recently also added the ability to filter playlists and album listings based on offline only, A-Z, or recently added. This makes it a lot easier to fire up the app and only stream music you have on your device. Spotify has had a search box at the top of the playlist that allows users to find the specific track you’re looking for – and recently they’ve added a dialog that warns you when you are trying to add a track that already exists on a playlist. Spotify makes it easy to view the album a track is from as well as add the track to your playlist. The biggest issue is how quickly Spotify stops syncing in the background when you close the app. I wish that it would take advantage of background sync and try to complete at intervals. Also, it should be noted the iPad app is outdated compared to its iPhone counterpart. I don’t listen to much music on my iPad though, so that’s not a big issue.

Rdio suffers from the same issues that the desktop app does – removing a track from a playlist causes the entire list to refresh, losing your place. The odd placement of the dialog when trying to action on a track means you have to scroll down a lot to add a song to a playlist or queue it. However, Rdio does offer a good ‘offline’ mode as well as some solid filtering options.

Beats has a really great mobile app, and it has solid filtering, offline sync and playlist action controls. The only odd thing about it is how slow the dialog is to determine if you have a song in your library or not. So, if you click on an album you want to add to your library, it might take 2-5 seconds to show the correct icon. Odd and confusing at times. I wish that data would be cached on app launch somehow. Beats also makes it really easy to remove all synced music from your device, while the others don’t offer this.

Winner: Spotify

Remote control

I love setting up a playlist or a station of music at home and using Airplay to broadcast to all the speakers we have in our house. I use iTunes Radio for this a lot, but I’ve also tried using streaming services to see if they can match that feature set.

Another feature that Rdio offers that I truly love is the remote control feature. If you’re playing Rdio from another location (say, you’re desktop) and you open your iOS app, you see a notification at the footer saying that Rdio is playing in another location. You can basically use your iOS app as a remote control, queueing up songs, changing tracks, giving a song a thumbs up/down if you’re playing a station – basically, anything you can do on your app. It’s a really great feature that is only missing the feature of letting you control which device is playing. I’d love to pick up my iOS device and just select my Mac from there, and press play. Currently, you have to initiate the play from the place you want to control remotely.

Spotify does this feature right but they also have an exception – currently the desktop app doesn’t support the Spotify Connect feature that allows for users to remotely control their music. So, if you have an iPad, an iPhone or a supported speaker (I have a Pioneer SMA3K speaker that has this functionality) you can fire up any app and find other supported playback destinations on you network and begin playback on your device or any other device. For now, you’re forced to use 3rd party remote control apps that are generally pretty awful.

Beats doesn’t do anything like this currently.

Winner: Rdio

Overall impressions

For those keeping score at home, here’s how each of the categories turned out:
Spotify: 3 (personalization, desktop app, mobile app)
Rdio: 2 (remote control, playlist / track management)
Beats: 2 (design, curation)

Every time I’ve ditched Rdio for another service, I end up coming back. I think that despite a lot of the implementation detail issues that drive me bonkers, Rdio just is built the way I want a streaming service to be built. I like that I can choose a bunch of music from anywhere to sync to a mobile device, and it’ll just happen the next time I open the app (I wish it’d happen in the background but alas). I like that, when I’m at home I can play music from my Mac on all my speakers and control it from any device without some hack workaround. I think Rdio has the best radio station feature by far, and the heavy rotation / personalized station features are also unique and top notch.

All that said, this time the bad has outweighed the fact that it is built the way I expect it to. The UX on the desktop and mobile apps are just atrocious and slow and I’m going to stick with Spotify for now. Their recent design refresh closed the gap with Rdio enough for me to be ok with the look and feel of the app, and the UX is mostly better than Rdio’s right now. Further, I just can’t shake the feeling that Rdio is the long-term loser here. Development and new features seem to have slowed lately, and I can’t see them keeping pace with Spotify or even Beats once the Apple acquisition is in full swing.

I do think that long term I’ll end up being a Beats customer – I have a hunch that Apple will eventually get their new division on board with creating a desktop app that (hopefully) stands alongside iTunes separately, but at worst will integrate into the iTunes app. If they handle the desktop app part correctly, bolt on some remote control functionality as well as flesh out their ‘sentence’ feature, I think that in a year I’ll be a Beats user. But for now, it’s on to Spotify – warts and all. Thanks for the ride Rdio – it’s a solid service that hitched their wagon to web technology and as a result just can’t offer the native experience that I’m looking for.

WWDC Announcements

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If you look back at what I wrote about the reasons that I would miss Android when I ultimately ditched the Nexus 5, it’s amazing how many of those will be irrelevant in a few short months.  Apple knocked it out of the park this week, and I can’t wait to see what amazing apps developers make with the new APIs and system-level integration made available to them.

Back to the iPhone

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I suppose we all saw this coming.

After a few months with a Nexus 5 as my primary phone, I’ve switched back to iOS and moved to AT&T. I was able to sell the Nexus 5 on eBay and actually make decent money on the switch back, and while my average monthly phone bill will increase by about 20 dollars, I’ll be getting unlimited texts and calls with a shared 6gb data allowance between my wife and I. I got a 32gb 5s and it feels good to be back ‘home’.

If Ting had supported the newest iPhone, I would have paid full price for the phone and considered staying with them. The service was a great value and coverage was rarely a problem for me in the metro Atlanta area. However, with AT&T altering their family plans and offering fairly generous shared data, the time was right to make the move. The only real knock on Ting is they are a great deal so long as you stay below 2 gigs of data and a fairly small number of texts and calls. I was always paranoid about sitting on work phone calls when I knew it might bump me into another tier.

So why did I ultimately ditch the Nexus 5? Two factors sealed the deal for me, and only one of them is going to get better any time soon in the Android world.

Android is too fiddly

In general, I found myself having to constantly tweak things to work the way I thought it should, and settle for average quality applications. If you’re an iOS user, you’ve come to expect a level of polish and attention to detail that just isn’t as common in 3rd party Android apps. As I said in one of my previous posts, Android definitely is ‘good enough’ to make the switch but I’ve become spoiled by apps on the iPhone and even a few months away wasn’t enough to get me over that. I can see myself considering Android in the future, but right now the lack of polish overall drove me bonkers.

It was really death by a thousand paper cuts. I’d get odd notifications at times I couldn’t figure out or adjust. Some apps would crash every time I used them. I could never find a Twitter client worth using. I could never get into using Wunderlist instead Things or OmniFocus. The battery life was good as long as I used the phone very lightly. And on and on. I felt like I was settling, and with iOS I had a known entity with its own flaws but overall worked way more in line with the way I expected things to work.

The stock Android system is actually quite nice. If you only want it use the stock apps, it’s actually a really impressive offering. For me, it was all about the 3rd party apps, though. I now realize how much I miss some of the key apps I use on my iPhone / iPad. The attention to detail and the focus on great user experiences on iOS really started to become apparent to me while using the Nexus. I kept looking at the phone saying “how are there 5 good versions of this app on iOS and not ONE good one for Android?” It was too much settling for ‘good enough’ – I missed using apps that delight the user (Tweetbot, OmniFocus, Pushpin, Byword, Day One, and more come to mind).

Not only was I missing those key apps, I felt like I had to manage the system too much. There were a lot of times that a rogue process would kill my battery, routinely forcing me to uninstall or troubleshoot. I’m not saying that’s an Android exclusive, but it happened more to me in the past 2+ months than any similar period with iOS. Overall, the Nexus 5 feels like a tiny little computer, which is great for the most part. iPhones, on the other hand, feel like they magically work nearly all of the time. There are limitations to being in Apple’s walled garden but the tradeoff is worth it for me. In general, I didn’t think I’d miss the Apple ecosystem as much as I did. iTunes, iCloud and everything else are a confusing mess at times, by they’re my confusing mess.

I had it in my head that by using the most of the Google ecosystem, that data would make my phone smarter. I really haven’t seen much of a true tangible benefit from buying all the way into the Google ecosystem at all, to be honest. When you add in the fact that it was doing this at the expense of using apps that aren’t as polished as I’m used to, it was hard to justify using Android. What’s interesting is that I think that the best ‘Google Experience’ may very well be an iPhone 5s with Gmail pulling in your email, Google Now alerting you to important events, G+ backing up your photos, using Google Maps for navigation and Chrome for browsing, while having the best built phone out there right now and having access to the great App ecossytem that Apple has. That’s basically what I was doing before switching to the Nexus, and I now realize the iPhone + Google services route is actually the best of both worlds.

I’m sure some of it is nearly 5 years of me learning how to use iOS vs only a few months on Android, but it just never felt right. I found myself fighting the interface and never felt as in control of the system as I ever did when using iOS – nor did I feel like the experience was as seamless as I was used to.

The hardware is average at best

The thing that Android handset makers can improve on but the Nexus 5 is lacking in is overall build quality. The handset, the camera, and things like the ringer and speakers all just feel kind of cheap – which I suppose is to be expected when you’re dealing with a handset that’s half the cost of an unsubsidized iPhone (I had even mentioned that in my previous post – is the iPhone really 2x as good as the Nexus 5 / Android 4.4? No, but it is better). The quality of photos I’ve taken in the past 12 weeks compared to the now 18 month old iPhone 5 were vastly inferior, which is disappointing. I spend so much time using my phone as a camera and I’m really realizing how crucial it is during my son’s early life to have something that I can take great photos with. Apple invests a ton in their cameras and it shows. So that’s one of the major driving factors in my purchase.

Other fit and finish issues:

  • The phone itself had issues with the speaker and required an RMA. To Google’s credit, this was a seamless process.
  • The screen is nice but otherwise the phone feels very cheap and I miss the quality of the iPhone.
  • The bulging camera on the back has annoyed me to no end. I want my phone to sit flush when I set it down on a table, and have no idea why Android device makers can’t figure this out.
  • I missed a lot of calls. The ringer just isn’t very good, nor is the vibrating motor. Never happened with iPhone.
  • GPS stinks on the Nexus 5.
  • I lose data connectivity often. Is this a Ting issue, or a Nexus one?

Conclusion

Android’s greatest strength is it’s “open” nature. This lends itself to never be able to compete on the “details” that Apple does so well, just like Apple’s focus on doing a few things really well make it tough for them to open things up to have the same level of customizability. All that being said, I can absolutely recommend an Nexus 5 to anyone looking for a good, affordable unlocked handset but for me, my investment in the Apple ecosystem was too much to keep me away for long. I’m used to and like the way that Apple does things, even if I am a bit turned off by a lot of the things that Apple did in iOS 7. I look forward to iOS 8, but also to the next generation of Android hardware and software. When my contract is up, I’ll definitely be looking to see who best meets my needs.

On Trusted Systems

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One of the side effects of switching from iOS to Android was my quest to find good cross-platform tools to accomplish all of the things I was already doing with my iPhone. This meant making some compromises and getting rid of some apps I have been using for years. One of the biggest casualties was OmniFocus. If you don’t know what OmniFocus is, it’s a task-management system that allows you to categorize to-do items with very powerful filtering so you can easily capture and show tasks that you need to be doing in a particular context (that is, a place or type of job).

In an effort to find something like OmniFocus, I tried a few similar apps, and finally settled on Wunderlist. While it’s a good enough app, I slowly fell off the wagon of truly trusting the system I was using to track tasks. I also took for granted how easy it was to add a task to OmniFocus via Siri (once OmniFocus is set up to pull in reminders, you simply tell Siri “remind me to…” and it’ll automatically be added to your list, for sorting later). Once you stop trusting the list as THE place to go for all of your to-do items, it has nearly zero value to you. The tasks you do add are too large to really break down into actionable chunks, and once this happens, the inertia of a bad list takes over, making it even more difficult to use a list of any kind.

One of the most important aspects of the GTD system of task management is breaking down every project or goal into the smallest, achievable tasks so that blockers can be eliminated and progress toward completion can be made. Wunderlist just wasn’t doing that for me. So, I’ve decided to switch back to OmniFocus, even if that means I won’t have access to viewing my tasks on Android (there is no Android app for OmniFocus to sync with). What I have done instead is found an Android app that allows you to add items to the iCloud reminders list, which allows me to at least quickly capture tasks when they come to mind. I will sort these items when I’m at a computer or on my iPad, which I have with me almost all of the time.

Is this an ideal solution? Not exactly, but it gets me back in the habit of doing daily reviews in the morning and weekly reviews over coffee on the weekends. I’ve been going with this approach for about 2 weeks now and I already feel like a lot of that mental clutter is gone, which is extremely valuable to me. Being able to trust that a list is the place that I dump any and all tasks in my brain is a huge burden lifted from a forgetful guy like myself, and has helped me stay more productive at work and able to get things done around the house as well.

As Cinderella once said, You Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone). If feels good to be back in OmniFocus land – and I’m really looking forward to the v2 updates for the Mac and the iPad – whenever those actually land.

A shorter version ‘A month with the Nexus 5’

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I realize how long that previous post was.  If you want the short version, here are my reasons to stick with Android and the Nexus 5 vs the reasons to switch back to an iPhone when the iPhone 6 comes out.

Reasons to stick with Android

  1. Keyboards are much better – more accurate, offer predictions.  There’s nothing like it on iOS.
  2. The larger screen is a joy to use.
  3. Intents are better than the half-baked url schemes in iOS.
  4. Notifications are better on Android – actionable, you can clear them singularly, and the LED notifications are a nice touch.
  5. Locale and apps like it are game-changers in how they allow you to let the phone manage itself.

Reasons to jump back to iOS

  1. Android is missing key apps (OmniFocus, Tweetbot, etc) that make using the OS always feel a bit hollow.
  2. The hardware isn’t as good as Apple’s. Camera quality, overall build quality and screen quality are unmatched.
  3. Apple ecosystem is more integrated, especially given my ownership of mostly Apple products.
  4. iMessages, warts and all, is a fantasatic way to keep in touch with my world, who almost exclusively use iOS.
  5. Android is too ‘fiddly’. I’m always searching forums for bugs and how to address them, dealing with janky software, and searching for good replacements for apps I loved on iOS.

A month with the Nexus 5

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Last month, I decided to switch from the iPhone 5 / Verizon to the Nexus 5 on Ting . The switching process went pretty well, and I was able to sell my iPhone to pay for the early termination costs. I’m going to try to go for about 6 months with this device and service to see if the tradeoffs are worth it. If you want to know how this story ends, the short version is that I’m happy with the phone 90% of the time, with the core functionality of the phone offering the ability to do a lot of things that aren’t possible on iOS. However, the polish and ‘seamless’ integration that iOS and an iPhone offer do leave me missing it from time to time. On to the bulleted lists!

First, the things I like about the Nexus 5 and Android.

  • Actionable notifications. I hope something like this is coming in iOS 8. Being able to reply to a message, tweet or email from the notification is so awesome. The current iOS implementation of notifications is awful in so many ways – ‘whack a mole’ badges, no way to dismiss singular notifications, and more make it a bad experience. Android has nailed this and made it even better over time.
  • Granular info about battery life and data use – helps track down offenders and changes my behavior. This has resulted in my using much less data and power than I was with my iPhone.
  • Easily share to any app you like via Intents. One of my favorite things about Android.
  • Setting defaults for all sorts of tasks. You can, for instance, set a default action for when you say “Make a note to ….” to put that note in any app you choose. What a concept, eh? Setting a default text client, email, calendar etc is great too.
  • Long press keyboard shortcuts for numbers and punctuation. I can type so much faster than on iOS.
  • Custom keyboards. I’ve installed SwiftKey, which you can optionally plug into your Gmail, Facebook or Twitter accounts to learn your speech patterns and offer predicitive sentence completion as well as the standard auto-correct. I type so much faster and accurately because of this feature as well.
  • Being able to choose from Dropbox when browsing files – composing emails, selecting images etc can use the Dropbox file system, making the phone feel even more like an extension of the desktop.
  • I won’t miss random rebooting of the phone after upgrading to iOS 7, that’s for sure.
  • How you can submit bug reports on app crashes. I feel like they actually make it to developers.
  • Real multitasking – things update when I tell them to, not based on some voodoo that Apple has determined (which is admittedly pretty nice, but it still feels like guesswork). The task switcher is also nicer. By stacking vertically you can see more apps at a time and quickly scroll through open applications.
  • Widgets. Evernote, Wunderlist, Calendar and Gmail. I don’t overdo it but I do use a few widgets and it’s really helpful – I haven’t tried any home screen widgets yet, but I may go that route soon.Being able to arrange my home screen in different ways.
  • The screen is a bit too big for me to reach the top left corner with my thumb (I’m right handed), so I have the ability to arrange the icons in a way that there’s nothing in that corner. Nice to have that flexibility.
  • A user interface that isn’t trying to hard to be cutesy. Buttons look like buttons and text looks like text.
  • Google Now & notifications about travel time, etc. Having an Android device even for a month has made me realize how much Google knows about me – it’s definitely creepy on some level, but so far has also been extremely helpful & convenient to be notified of package delivery dates, appointment travel times, and breaking news based on sites I frequent.
  • The way Google releases most software unbundled from the OS means you get timely updates.
  • Vibrate and silent are two separate modes. Switching between the three modes is simple and gives you more control, as sometimes I don’t even want my phone buzzing.
  • Using an app like Locale or Tasker means you can set ‘conditions’ – things like being on a certain wifi network, at a certain location, or connected to a certain power source – and then do things based on that. I use it to disable a passcode when I’m at home or at my parents house as well as bluetooth state and ringer volume.
  • The concept of system wide accounts. Add dropbox, twitter, etc once and it’s used system wide. Kind of like what Apple is doing with certain partners but greatly expanded.
  • Fine grained control of what apps can sync via wifi or cellular.
  • I love the date picker so much more than the iOS implentation.
  • Persistent notifications for things like audio players so it’s easy to quickly see what track is playing. Similar to Control Center but I like the Android implentation better.
  • Surprisingly, the LED notifications are useful. Less checking to see if you missed a notification.
  • The whole ‘there’s an app for that’ is even more true on the Android side. So many utilities that do little one off tasks or tweak the system. Very *nix-like.
  • Being able to install and manage apps from the web. Anywhere. I do this all the time and it’s really awesome.

Overall, the transition has been pretty easy, but I am missing a few apps:

  • Calendars 5 – still searching for a good calendar app. Still using the default Calendars app for now.
  • Day One. Nothing like it anywhere – I tend to just use the app a lot less and only on my iPad.
  • Tweetbot. I’m using Plume but it’s nowhere as good at Tweetbot, but it works the way I expect it to and isn’t buggy like some of the other apps.

Along the way, I’ve discovered a handful of really neat apps that have made the transition a lot easier.

But it’s not all puppy dogs and rainbows. There are definitely some things that iOS and the iPhone did differently and better in my mind.

  • Visual voice mail. This doesn’t exist on Ting (it’s possible on the Nexus, but is dependent on the network you’re on) so I’ve been transported back to 2006.
  • The ‘security’ of iCloud backups. I knew if anything went wrong with my phone, I could restore to a very recent version of my phone and not miss a beat. Android doesn’t really have anything like that out of the box.
  • Better quality hardware. The vibrating motor on the N5 is substandard and the phone is nice but just not on Apple’s terms. I’m still terrified of breaking that protruding lens. The screen quality was a bit better on the iPhone 5 – not a huge deal, but the color and brightness seemed to be better in iPhone world.
  • The camera is better as of 4.2.2 but it’s still not as good as my 18 month old iPhone 5 was.
  • Predictability and simplicity. Overall, the system may not be able to do some things that I can do on my Nexus, but everything works predictably and consistenly. This is a big deal.
  • iMessages, iMessages, iMessages. I’m trying to settle into something that isn’t as jarring for others – most people just can send texts but it can be problematic for group texts or for people sending Messages from their iPads. Facebook messenger is the best option so far. I miss sending and receiving messages from any device and it just working (although iMessages has its own set of issues).
  • No universal scroll to top. This has proven to drive me bonkers on many occasions. Most apps have a way to do this from within their specific app but there is no system wide way to do this like in iOS.
  • No system-wide undo. Really.
  • Buttery smooth UI. You learn not to care as much but it’s an issue on Android. Some apps scroll brilliantly and others feel like you’re on a 386.
  • Apps seem to crash more in Android than on iOS. Same goes for hung processes – there have been a few days where I’ll notice my phone is warm and some rogue app has been running in the background for 2 hours, killing a quarter of my battery. It’s awesome that you can use Android’s built in battery stats to find the offender, though.
  • The community for Android folks just isn’t the same. No good Android podcasts or blogs. Sounds silly but it is a con. There’s no John Gruber for Android, etc.
  • Same goes for indie developers. The stock Android apps are really quite good, and there are a lot of good indie devs, but the community is really no contest.
  • Notification / privacy settings are all in one place. I liked how easy it was to go down the list and quickly make a decision about which apps have permissions to do what on my phone. On Android, you have to make most of these choices from within the apps themselves, and then only with the preferences they give you.
  • Better quality software. I’ve found lots of great alternative apps but they are all good enough, not great.
  • No swipe down to search spotlight. I didn’t realize how addicted I was to this. You can search for apps from the Google box on Android or say “OK google, open ”, but it’s not as ingrained in my muscle memory yet.
  • Urbanears volume buttons don’t work on Android – the play/pause works fine, however.
  • iOS’ Control Center is actually really nice from an accessibility standpoint. turning on/off bluetooth, Wifi etc is one tap less than it’d take to go through the same means on Android.
  • If my iPhone was muted and I plug in headphones, the audio level changes. It’s a little more complex on the android side.
  • Do Not Disturb mode. I can use an app like Locale and others to replicate similar functionality but the Apple solution was very elegant in that you said “don’t disturb me between these hours” and it took care of the rest, even knowing who your VIP contacts were, and making exceptions for them.
  • I’m still working through photo management. Right now, Google+ and Dropbox both get a copy of my photos pushed to the cloud. Sharing photos with family straight from my phone is no longer as easy, as we all have a shared photo stream that we post to. Sharing photos w/ my family now involves me doing it from my Mac or iPad, copying the files from Dropbox to iPhoto’s shared photo stream. It works, but it’s just not as ‘instant’ (which may or may not be a good thing for my family). But for me, it means I don’t get to see those photos during the day of my son unless they’re sent via Facebook messenger or another medium I use.
  • Safari’s Reader mode. Great for those non-mobile optimized pages.
  • Google Now isn’t as magical at this moment as I hoped it would be. That may change if/when I travel, but right now it’s useful but not as predictive as I’d hoped. Not sure it’s worth the sort of tradeoff you make regarding privacy. The voice search is better than Siri’s offering in speed, accuracy and results presenstation, though.

Ting’s service so far has been pretty solid overall. In my daily use I get solid LTE coverage in most places, degrading to fast-enough 3G when I’m a bit off the beaten path. I have had a few instances already where coverage is bad which has a tendency to nuke the battery as it’s searching for network. I’ll have more on this after I spend more time out and about with the phone.

As I use a tablet more than I do a phone nowadays, the fact that the Nexus 5 is ‘good enough’ is about all I really need. I use my phone a lot less now in general, which I like – I want to focus more on using my phone for a few things – taking photos, getting directions, consuming media and catching up on news when killing time.  I feel like I spend less time just seeing what’s going on now with my Nexus, as the OS and apps feel ‘smarter’ in a lot of ways – bubbling up key information into the notification view in a way that I can take action on it very easily, usually not even having to view the actual app. I think that iOS 7, love it or hate it, focused on UX and aesthetics along with a few nice new features under the hood. Hopefully iOS 8 is focused more on the brains behind the ‘beauty’, as I think there are a lot of places Apple could take cues from Android to make the OS more intuitive and make the ‘virtual assistant’ side of Siri much more useful. By making notification center more useful, adding some sort of inter-app communication, and focusing on the typing experience, Apple would make some massive strides to making up for the gap between it and Android.

I waffle on whether or not I miss the iPhone. Things are certainly simpler and more ‘cohesive’ on iOS, the apps are more polished, and the hardware feels nicer. App discovery is a lot easier too, as it seems like there is an entire community on Twitter and the web focused on surfacing the best apps and games out there, which in turn drives revenue for the developers. Everything feels more polished, integrated, and focused even if it doesn’t do quite as many cool things as Android does.

But really, Android and the Nexus 5 is good enough 90% of the time. I do miss iMessage, a handful of other apps, and how easy Photo Stream is to use, but otherwise more days than not I’m happy with the Nexus 5. I’ve leaned a lot about the joy of off-contract phone use, and will probably get my next phone off contract, wherever it is. Even if you buy a brand new iPhone, you’ll end up saving a good $300-$500 over 2 years. That’s not nothing. What I’ll probably do is wait until the iPhone 6 (or whatever it’s called) is announced and then decide what to do from there. Bottom line – the iPhone and its ecosystem is better than Nexus and the Android ecosystem. But the phone costs nearly half what an iPhone does AND my phone bill is half what I was paying. Is the iPhone, its ecosystem and phone plans TWICE as good as what I’m using? I guess the next few months will answer that question for me.

Step One: Moving from Verizon to Ting

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In my previous post , I mentioned I was considering switching to the Nexus 5. So after thinking about it for a bit, I’ve decided to take the plunge. Best case scenario, I use a phone I really like and save a lot of money doing it by switching to a lower-cost carrier off contract. Worst case, the money I’ll save even in a few months means I can jump on my wife’s carrier and get an iPhone 5S or whatever is out at the time. With that mindset, I ordered a SIM from Ting, the provider I’m going to use for my Neuxs 5 about a week ago, and it arrived in the mail yesterday. With all of the materials in place, it was time to move from an iPhone to a Nexus, and from Verizon to Ting.

There are a number of steps involved with a ‘bring your own device’ setup with a carrier that we take for granted but fortunately all of this is documented very well on Ting’s knowledge base. First off, I had to do a carrier reset for the phone to recognize the SIM card. Secondly, when I tried to activate my phone, apparently the activation service on Ting.com was down. I spoke with a rep on the phone who suggested I try again later. I tried again the next day and things were then up and running. I entered in my phone’s IMEI number as well as the SIM’s number and I was on my way. I had to enter a few things on the phone itself to configure it to work with text messaging and such, but the entire process (there is a support article that covers how to do all of this.), once the web site was working, took about 5 minutes.

My setup process was far from a great first experience given the one day delay, but these things happen. I’ll be honest – most all the terms and screens I dealt with were new territory for me, which means that most anyone should be able to do this, but also is kind of frustrating that it’s this difficult to get a phone working on a carrier by yourself. Maybe I’m being naive, but I just hope for a world where consumers really can take their device to any provider just by putting in a new SIM and signing up online without tons of configuration options.

Once I set up the phone as a new device, the number just ported over and that officially ended my service with Verizon. This month’s service is already paid for so my final bill from Verizon will be an ETF for canceling my service early. Within about 2 hours of porting my number, the Nexus 5 was working as intended. I deactivated iMessages on my iPhone so that texts would more reliably go to my Nexus when sent from other iMessage users, but otherwise didn’t do anything but shut off my iPhone. Through Gazelle, I sold my iPhone 5 (Verizon, 16gb) for $240 – more than enough to cover the ETF from Verizon ($200) on it’s own. It doesn’t hurt that Ting will pay $75 towards that as well. All you have to do is provide them with your final bill, proving you did in fact cancel and port that number over to Ting. Not bad.

My goal is to use Ting and the Nexus 5 for a few months and then make a decision about the long-term feasibility of this setup. It’s not like I’m ditching iOS completely, I’ll just do most of my iOS use on my new retina iPad Mini or my iPod touch and use the Nexus as my phone. I’m hoping it’s the best of both worlds. I’ll try to post a few updates as I go along regarding, Ting, the Nexus 5 and Android in general, all from an iOS user’s perspective. I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of folks out there like myself who are growing a bit weary of the way things are going in the iOS / carrier subsidized phone world, and maybe I can give some information on the pros and cons of making the leap.