Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Several months have passed and if I wasn’t keeping track I would have thought it had been longer. My transition from iPhone/Rogers to Android/Wind came together in an abrupt fashion. The move consumed my thoughts for days and then it happened and that was it. The dust has long since settled and I’m still happily using my Wind device and loving Android.

I have been told that my previous posts didn’t have any jubilation over Android, almost as if there was some hesitancy but I can say that I really do love Android, maybe not to the way I loved the iPhone because there are the occasional hiccups that make me shake my head and wonder how green the grass was beyond that fence.

It didn’t take as long as I thought but I am completely used to my Android device. My muscle memory has stopped trying to click on the home button, and as I continue to use Android going forward I may love it the same way I did the phone from Cupertino.

Battery Life
This is more a problem with the LG Optimus 2X than Android but one leads to the other so a hardware problem affects my enjoyment of Android. I have a charger at home, at work and in the car in order to keep my phone fully powered. If I know I’m going to be away from an outlet for a long period of time I charge a spare battery and take that with me. It’s a minor inconvenience but it’s something I have had to deal with while on Android.

I will say that battery life has improved significantly over the last few months due to the Cyanogenmod 7 nightly builds I put on the phone. As I use the multiple batteries I have I find they are getting better life but it’s a marginal increase. These improvements are minor but going from a 50% charge by noon to a 75% charge by noon is good but I am still a ways off from going a few days without plugging in.

Force Close
Facebooooook ()! Or maybe Android 2.3.7! Or maybe my CyanogenMod is to blame but either way it’s always with the Force Close for the Facebook application. It feels like a daily occurrence. It is a minor annoyance to click a button on the phone, wait a few seconds and click on the application but it’s one of the few small problems I have that make me wish for the functional and slick iOS feel.

Potpourri
I can’t stop saying it but I miss the polish and integration of iOS, even after months of using Android I still like the feel of iOS. However, I will open up a setting that was previously disabled to me on iOS, or enable my phone to do something that non-jailbroken iPhone’s couldn’t do and feel in awe of the device.

I feel that CyanogenMod is something that makes my Android device better. I am not restricted to LG releasing a new version of Android 2.3 after months of delays, I don’t have to wait and wonder if Ice Cream Sandwich will be released for my device because CyanogenMod will make something that will run on my phone, provide more options than I would have otherwise and release builds faster than LG can release new phones.

Having a functional phone that allows you to do what you want when you want, free of corporate application approval policies, is a beautiful thing and giving up a bit of polish is a small price to pay for that.

Wind has been treating me fine. There are times where I’m surprised to be within the Wind Home network, and others the signal can’t penetrate. I don’t have to rely on my phone within tall buildings downtown so the times I am without a signal are few and far between.

There was a period where I wasn’t connected to the data network so this made surfing the Internet outside a WiFi connection difficult. This was due to the APN not being set, or not being configured correctly. My phone had the correct APN data for the Wind network but it wouldn’t connect.

After going a few weeks without mobile data usage I decided to look into it further. I cleared the APN data, re-entered it, added values and removed them, all to no avail. Then after another round of testing and fumbling with the settings it worked. I wasn’t going to ask any questions, so I left things as they were and went from using 0K on the mobile network to as high as 22MB a week later ().

All in all I’m still happy on Wind and happier on Android. I love the possibilities with Android, the realization that anything is possible, and when I look at a 50% decrease in my phone bill I’m all the happier I made this transition.

I have been using Android for a few weeks now and feel pretty comfortable in it, but there are some habits from iOS I haven’t been able to shake, and surprisingly they are related to typing.

My first week with Android had ups and downs. After a few days of suffering with the atrocious battery life of the LG Optimus 2X I decided to install CyanogenMod and accidentally installed the wrong ROM version. I used “LG Optimus 2X” instead of “T-Mobile G2X” and the phone wouldn’t boot and I was not able to access the recovery console.

I struggled to resolve this on my Parallels installation of Windows through my MacBook Pro for the better part of a day. When I troubleshot the issue on a proper Windows machine I undid my mistake in less than 15 minutes and within 30 I had the correct version of CyanogenMod installed and was back to customizing and installing applications.

Wind Mobile sells the phone as a “LG Optimus 2X” but it’s actually a T-Mobile variety called the “G2X” and their software isn’t interchangeable. I came as close to making the phone as inoperable as I would like. With that mess behind me I am like a kid in an elevator pushing buttons with all of the customization tweaks available.

I used the stock Optimus 2X software for a few days, liked the ability to use Swype as my keyboard of choice but that is all I miss after upgrading to CyanogenMod. I signed up for the Swype beta and installed Swype within CM7 but ran into some issues switching the keyboard over. The application would force close and it would never launch properly. Like most things on Android, it is possible to install something, but it requires a bit of legwork that I have yet to look into yet. A week after experiencing my initial issue I tried installing it again and now everything is perfect and have no reason to ever return to the stock ROM that shipped on the phone.

Wind
I have not left the Edmonton or Sherwood Park Wind coverage region yet () so whenever I’ve looked at my phone I have had reception. Even in my basement I get reception, an area Rogers wasn’t able to adequately cover. I rarely download anything over the cell network but when I do it blazes (SpeedTest results ()). For the few calls I have made call quality has been good and Gord reported it sounded better than when he spoke to me over my iPhone.

Thus far I have no complaints with Wind, but the moment I spend a weekend at Lac la Biche or visit Dad in Millet I’ll lament not having coverage but for $29 a month it’s a sacrifice I can make.

I noticed I wasn’t receiving text messages on @gursky mentions via Twitter or SMS reminders for a Google Calendar event. I didn’t think much about this but under Mobile Setup for Google Calendar I noticed that Wind Mobile was missing from the drop down list (). None of the other carriers listed would work so for the time being I am left without SMS alerts.

As the Wind Mobile network expands I can only hope that they become recognized and appear in the same drop down list as the big telecom companies in Canada.

Android
The learning curve is starting to plateau and while all touch operating systems probably behave the same way the naming convention and knowing what icons control what is something I’m still learning. If I read an article or a forum post explaining how to do something I won’t know where the person is referring to unless the explicitly explain each touch press they made to get there. Simply saying “edit the Application Drawer settings…” loses me.

It’s the small accomplishments where I understand the Android OS a little more that feel like the biggest gains. It was only a few days ago I learned how to precisely move the cursor when editing text. I would keep finger pressing the paragraph of text hoping to get the cursor into position when all I had to do was click and drag the indicator that appeared (). With Apple I would hold down on the area of text I wanted to insert the cursor, wait for the Magnifying Glass () to appear, and then I would roll my finger left or right to place the cursor precisely. These are small accomplishments but slowly add up to being more comfortable with Android.

I think the biggest surprise I have encountered with Android is that if I don’t like how something operates I can modify the settings or install an alternate app that can achieve what I want. With the iPhone if I didn’t like the Calendar or Mail application I was at the mercy of Apple to release updates or venture into the Cydia aftermarket. In the Android Market the options are almost endless.

These infinite options have led to a few problems with the phone. Every application has a setting for notification and behavior, but those settings can be overridden elsewhere in Settings and figuring out which one is causing the application to not behave correctly can be a little annoying. Because I can have multiple applications for the same job I have found that this leads to the phone getting confused.

For instance, while listening to WinAmp I lock the phone but if I advance songs through the lock screen widget a different playlist begins playing and I have two songs going at the same time (and last.fm gets all sorts of confused ()).

These will all be resolved in time, it’s just a matter of taking the effort to isolate the issue and remove the application. Android gives you the power to get into trouble but also allows you complete control to undo your mistake.

I miss the simplicity of iTunes and iPhone, I liked having a desktop application that I could control all information on my phone from. This was a nuisance if I wanted to sync my phone with a new album or add a new video and had to wait until I was back at my main computer. With Android if I want to add a new song I can do so from anywhere and it works. It’s really as simple and dragging the file onto the phone when it’s plugged into a computer (or set up wireless syncing if I was so inclined).

I never realized how used I got to “swipe horizontally to bring up a ‘delete’ toggle” () with iOS but I find myself doing that frequently with Android in Messaging or Email. It’s easy enough to delete something within Android but swiping across was such an elegant way of taking a shortcut to delete something. This wasn’t a feature I immediately noticed in iOS and it’s funny how those little features end up making the biggest difference.

I find myself missing badges on the application icon () that shows the number of outstanding/unread messages. This was necessary for games or emails and I really miss it. You can download notification applications for the Launcher of your choice but I have not found them to work reliably, and paying for something that feels like it should be available by default is a little backwards.

Plus, there isn’t a notification for all the applications I use so it would be a little wasted. The Android notification bar () at the top of the screen is nice, but with iOS 5 getting badges and their own notification bar I feel like I’m one step behind here as far as software is concerned.

Another gripe I have is that I wish there was a little consistency between applications. In iOS I would tap near the top and the application would scroll back up. I have found this to not be common in all Android equivalent applications. I hope this is something that will become available in the future because it was incredibly handy for browsing my Twitter stream or a long webpage.

Being able to send applications from the online marketplace to the device is a great feature. This is such a brilliant concept it makes locating and installing a lot of applications a breeze. Even if the phone isn’t physically connected to the computer it can still receive application installations (), amazing!

Every few days I discover something else that I am missing from iOS and then I will Swype a message and forget all about it. I am surviving with Android and maybe in the distant future I’ll wonder how I ever survived without the little green robot.

I am no longer using an iPhone as my cellphone of choice.

Let that sink in for a moment. I have purchased an iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 on launch days, lining up several hours before the store opened and I give up the Apple device so close to the release of the iPhone 5? How did this happen?

For the last few months Gord has been touting the joys of cheap () and reliable phone service from Wind. After looking at my $70+/month phone bill with great disgust I thought it was time to become contract free and save some money. Wind and Mobilicity operate on the AWS network band and this means that all available versions of the iPhone are incompatible so if I was going to make the switch I would have to (1) wait until T-Mobile became a carrier of the iPhone 5 (who operate on the AWS band) or (2) go in the opposite direction and use an Android device.

T-Mobile announced they would not be receiving the iPhone 5 so if I was going to be contract free it would be without Apple. I have always been curious about Android but had no reason to switch so Hell froze over and I made the move.

Mobilicity did not have coverage in Sherwood Park so I was limited to look at Wind phones. There are new Android devices released every month but Wind only had a few available to purchase, and even fewer were in stock.

I went to five different Wind locations (two at Blockbuster and three kiosks) before finding one that had the LG Optimus 2X in stock. I tried to phone in advance but no one answered the listed numbers so I had to drive to each and ask about their inventory levels. Gord gave me some assistance from Calgary as to which stores had the LG in stock but I was still turned down at the City Center kiosk.

I was willing to drive a bit to switch from Rogers but my patience was growing a little thin locating kiosks inside a mall. Thankfully Kingsway Mall would be my last stop as they had the LG in stock. The annoyance of driving around has long been forgotten and in the end it all worked out. The phone may not be one of the HTC brands I lust over but the the important thing is that I am off Rogers and am a free agent.

I love iOS and find the Android OS very confusing so I am faced with a bit of a learning curve. Millions of other people figured out Android so I’m sure I will in time, it will just take some hands on experience.

I sold my iPhone 4 to a co-worker and the money earned nearly paid for terminating my Rogers contract so that’s it. I’m an Android user. Maybe for a year, maybe forever. I do know I won’t go near another long term contract when there is now some much needed competition in the market.

I’ll write another post on my thoughts about Wind and Android in a few weeks time.

Update: The post regarding my first two weeks with Wind and Android is here.