Beyond purpose

First a little background; I’ve gone from a Siemens S45, Sony Ericson T610, a Sanyo S750, a Nokia N80, then an iPhone 3G (the day it was available in the UK). Now I’m enjoying the Nexus One with Android.

I find it really hard to say that one is better than the other, which is frustrating because while Android is probably as close as an OS can get to competing against the iPhone, it’s still remarkably different. iOS is slick, sleek and reassuringly reliable. I never feel as though something has gone wrong or it’s done something I really didn’t want it to do. Android is powerful, flexible and delightfully intuitive in a number of ways (though I’ve sworn at it once or twice when it did something unexpected). iOS eschews complexity and only has one button to interact with the OS – Android gives you consistent Back, Menu, Home and Search buttons, as well as a trackball for moving around text. As much as I’d like to, it wouldn’t be right to say that the simplicity of one is better than the flexibility of the other.

The power and flexibility trade-off has consequences though; quite simply, Android is more powerful and therefore a better smartphone, the iPhone is simpler and therefore a better phone. The less technical will probably prefer the iPhone, those that want a smarter phone (email and facebook) would perhaps be better served by the iPhone. Those that want a smartphone (background IM, push news updates) would be better served by Android.

The uncomfortable conclusion is therefore that, in terms of your experience, it’s up to you.

Bollocks to that though, this is my blog and I’ve been apolitical for long enough. There is more than just experience; I would never buy an iPhone now.

I’m not sure I’d have bought the iPhone had I not been comfortable in the knowledge that I’d be able to jailbreak it if I wanted to. I want to be able to use my technology as I see fit. With the iPhone, you’re buying a lump of metal and plastic, an OS, and a manner in which to use that OS.

With an Android phone, you’re buying a lump of metal and plastic that you can use however you see fit. You can hack the OS, you can kill the battery after 6 hours with an app that checks facebook every 10 seconds, you can replace the app that handles SMS with one that crashes every 5 minutes.

In a trade off between freedom and ease of use, I will not always choose freedom, I am happy to use somewhat locked-in technologies in order to get the best experience, but the iPhone is just too far. I want to be able to try beta software, I want to be able to try new ideas to handle SMS messages, and I cannot stomach the idea of having other peoples’ tastes and morals imposed on me.