miTech

Well, it’s late 2009. Only 12 days left to go ’till the next decade. And right before the holidays, the iPhone vs. Android war is at an all-time high, especially with the announce of the Nexus One.

Some background. I’m 14. I love Linux and have been using it for the past 10 years. I love everything open source. And at the same time I love the inarguable beauty, the amazing simplicity, and functionality of Apple’s products. I am in the position of choosing between either the iPhone 3GS 16GB or the HTC Hero/HTC Droid Eris/Motorola Droid/Google Nexus One. I’ll try to give an honest comparison here, and I will say, I love Google, and I love open source, so there is a slight bias towards that end.

Let’s size them up. I’ll be comparing the proposed Google Nexus One (the not-yet-released but best Android phone yet) to the iPhone 3GS 16GB.

Hardware:

• CPU – the Nexus One processor is a SnapDragon (about ~1 Ghz), which is far better than the one in the iPhone (800 Mhz underclocked to 600 Mhz for battery life). Nexus One wins. By far.
• RAM – 320 MB on the Nexus One (unconfirmed) vs 256MB on the iPhone. Nexus One also takes this one, but not by much.
• Storage – iPhone – 16GB, Nexus One – up to 16GB with a microSD card. Tie.
• Display – Nexus One has 800×480px resolution, and 3.7 inch display size which far outperforms the 320×240 resolution and 3.5 inch size of the iPhone. Nexus One takes this one, again by far.
• Camera – iPhone has 3 megapixels with tap-to-focus, Nexus One has 5 megapixels with flash and autofocus. Nexus One definitely wins.
• Battery – No details on the battery life of the Nexus One yet. The iPhone isn’t that bad in that department, but the Nexus One has a user-replaceable battery. But still tie.
• FM Radio – iPhone doesn’t have one, Nexus One does. ‘Nuff said. I use this a lot. So Nexus One.
• Size – Nexus One supposedly much thinner than iPhone. Screen is bigger. Nexus One again.
• Additional features – Both have compasses, accelerometers, Bluetooth, and WiFi. Tie.

Well, as you can see, hardware-wise, the Nexus One is far better than the iPhone. But hardware is only half the story. Let’s move on to software.

• Widgets – I gotta say, I love the widgets on Android. I’d love the ability to pull a device out of my pocket, turn it on, and see the weather right there. The Android and iPhone app selectors are about the same. But if you jailbreak your iPhone, you can get widgets on your desktop (more on this in a later post). So it’s possible. They tie for that.
• General look and feel – Well, it depends. With the new Sense UI, the Hero and Droid Eris have been just beautiful. But it’s still a game of catch-up with the iPhone, that (in my opinion) just takes the cake in terms of design and general feel. I love it. iPhone wins.
• App Store – Sorry Android. But you have a far way to go to get anywhere near the quality and amount of iPhone apps on the App Store. “There’s an app for that” is exactly right. The actual selection and the quality of apps on the iPhone far surpasses the Android apps (for now), in part due to the restrictions placed on iPhone app developers. However, in Android’s defense, Apple had better allow Google Maps Navigation, Google Voice, Google Goggles, and Google Latitude onto the iPhone eventually. Those Android-only apps are making me want to beg Apple. But for now, iPhone wins.
• Openness – Must this be explained? Android is open source. Which makes it extremely open. The Android Market almost never blocks apps (cough cough Apple). But let’s not forget about jailbreaking, which opens the iPhone up to install whatever we want. But the iPhone is still too closed off in many ways. So Nexus One wins, but barely.
• App Consistency – I love what Apple did. They went and created a GUI toolkit for the iPhone, encouraging app developers to use the existing GUI widgets instead of their own (like what Android does). This provides for a consistent look and feel between apps, and a beautiful overall appearance. iPhone wins.
• Fragmentation – Mac’s don’t have this problem. Neither does the iPhone. Since the hardware is locked down, the software is tightly integrated to work for that hardware. The Android OS can run on a wide variety of hardware (this is a good thing), and does so. However, this causes inconsistabilities and is difficult for app developers because their apps work on some, but not all platforms.
• Games – I’m 14. I love games. Action games, simulator, first person shooters, you name it. And the iPhone has tons of all of those, ranging from Call of Duty to Guitar Hero (Tap Tap Revenge) to Doodle Jump. At this point, the Android Market is severely lagging in the game department. A big downer for me. iPhone takes this one.
• Multitouch – The final one, and (in my opinion) is multitouch. I love multitouch. I tried iPhone’s browser once and never went back to stylus browsing with my WinMo 2003 PDA. Maps, browsing, apps, everything is amazing with multitouch. But Apple holds a patent on that. On the Nexus One, the hardware supports multitouch, but at this point, none of the apps use it (browsing/maps/etc.). Which is a huge downer for me. (However, the HTC Android phones with Sense UI have limited multitouch in browsing, and none in maps.) So definitely iPhone.

And one last thing that isn’t hardware or software related:

• Brand Image – As of now, the iPhone is a recognized name. Businesses think that producing an iPhone app will add to their growth and popularity, and that’s true. The same isn’t [yet] true for the Android, but it’s slowly becoming more and more known as time goes on. But for now, the iPhone.

The iPhone’s hardware is definitely lacking compared to the Nexus One. But the iPhone software, at this point, far surpasses that of the Nexus One. But don’t forget, it’s only a matter of time before the Android Market and the Android software improves. Android is still in its infancy. And due to its open source nature, Android has a much larger chance to improve much faster than the iPhone. So we have something to look forward to in 2010.

But what do you think? If I’m getting a new phone this season, should I get the iPhone, or should I get the Nexus One and wait for the software to evolve?

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Hmmmm, Mozilla. The fast lane? I don’t think so. If you’ve been keeping up with all the recent Firefox developments, you might have noticed that Mozilla has been boasting the dramatic speed increase of the newest version of Firefox (3.5, see http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html). Firefox has always been my absolute favorite browser, but even with the newest version, I’m finding it to be very sluggish on my Ubuntu desktop, my parents’ XP desktop, and especially my new Eeebuntu Netbook (more on that later).

I’ve tried many things. I’ve searched the Internet for suggestions and tips on how to speed up my browser. The thing I dislike the most is how long it takes for a browser window to open (on my parents’ old XP machine, IE opens in 3 seconds, FF in 10). There are many Youtube videos, and long lists of items to tweak in your about:config. Well, I’ve applied every single one of the changes in that list, and I didn’t notice any difference!

But there is a way, as I’ve found out today: optimized Firefox builds. I’ve tried Swiftfox before, in fact I use it on my desktop (totally forgot I was using it ). Swiftfox (http://getswiftfox.com/) calls itself the “Optimized Mozilla Firefox Build for Linux”. Swiftfox is pretty good, but their binaries are closed-source, so I like an alternative better: Swiftweasel. Swiftweasel is basically Swiftfox with the proprietary-ness removed (also some neat features added, see their website).

I downloaded their binary, and wow! I’m typing from Swiftweasel right now, and it opens tabs instantly, loads documents faster than I could’ve imagined, and opens in a blazing 2 seconds!

You can download Swiftweasel at http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/. I’d encourage you to check it out.

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Well, I’m back from my blogging break. I guess I just needed some time to get some new ideas. I expect to be blogging fairly often now.

I’ll start off this week with a podcast/vodcast called Diggnation. It’s created by Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, 2 great guys that know how to keep people entertained. If you like Digg.com and you want to hear some of the most popular stuff going on there, along with some humor, fun, and commentary, then watch Diggnation at revision3.com.

To start you off, I’ve included the most recent episode here, for your viewing pleasure:

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If you don’t know about SLAX, read my few previous posts about it. It’s a great, fast, small operating system you can carry around with you.

SLAX has an interesting package manager approach. It’s quite simple. You download packages, called modules, then you double-click them to install them, and then do that again to uninstall them. It’s that easy. If you go to the SLAX website (http://slax.org) and click on Modules, you will only get ~ 20 modules. This isn’t the real picture, though. There are actually about 600+ modules available for SLAX, they are just not approved. To access them, you must go to the forum, and click on other people to get a list of their modules. An easy way I have found to find these modules is to go to Google, and type in “slax <package name>”, where <package name> can be Firefox, Opera, whatever. For example, to find SuperTux (a great Mario-like game), you would type “slax supertux”, to find it. It’s a great and simple approach, and as they rightfully describe it, “package management beyond your dreams”.

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