I fucked up. I was stupid and maybe I drank too much, but I made a mistake.
I switched to the Galaxy S4.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe it was the fanfare, maybe it was the stupid impractical features. But I did it. and I’m sorry.
I’m sorry because that phone (and android in general) are not as advertised. That is unless of course you’re looking to hover your finger centimeters away from your phone to swipe to tap apps rather than using the TOUCH-screen interface. Or if you’re looking to use your shoulder, elbow, and wrist in a large wiping motion to swipe between photos in the gallery like some bastardized XBOX kinect rather than, once again, using the screen god gave you.
If you want to use non-sensical gestures with limited success rather than the intelligent, intuitive ones, then man do I have a device for you.
The once Android Market is now Google Play. As a branding professional, most certainly a better choice, but aside from a logo, little has changed. Sure the rise in market share has forced many developers to create offerings for android, but much like their knock-off, no name, dime-a-dozen, handsets, the app offerings are crappy Chinatown wannabe’s of the iOS offerings.
Don’t believe me? Find a friend with the handset opposite yours and open: Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and one of your choosing. Trust me, Android looks like it’s from a long long time ago in a Galaxy far far from the first world.
If your company uses an intuitive and popular project management software like Basecamp or Teamwork, good luck keeping up on Android. The apps don’t exist, and trust me, I found out the hardest of ways. Want to forward along an email to a colleague so that they can reply to your client? Too bad, Samsung’s native email application (not Google’s) doesn’t have the capability to forward along email addresses.
That’s right: hover based gesture technology, but it doesn’t have the same contact forwarding capability of a singing telegram.
So I fucked up. And for 4 months I tried to tell myself this was a new and exciting time in my life. A time of freedom and experimentation. A time to get away from the locked down old shrew of Apple.
But what started out as a sexy romp with a flashy new piece turned into a psychotic reign of inexplicable freak outs and non-functioning lunacy.
Not just with my flashy Samsung Galaxy S4 but with my ‘pure android’ Nexus 7 too. It’s inconsistent performance has been the most consistent feature.
Sometimes I wake it from sleep and the clock is upside down.
Upside down. The clock. What the actual fuck?
Sometimes hitting the volume button turns it down, sometimes it does nothing at all, and sometimes it causes the screen to dim, it’s like a ‘shuffle’ button for my rage level. Pretty cool feature.
And so, like a man who spent one too many nights in Vegas, I’m home. Back to my strict but reliable darling, my iPhone (5S this time).
And you know what? After the seemingly tequila fueled hellish blackout nightmare that was the last 4 months.