MERGED - iPhone

divine

Superstar
BGOL Investor
Switching from Android to iPhone 4? Here’s what you need to know
from TiPb: The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch blog by Rene Ritchie
link

How to make the switch from Android to iPhone 4


iphone_4_android_switch.png


iPhone 4 with its 960×640 retina display, easy-peasy FaceTime video calling, high quality 5mp back-illuminated camera that shoots 720p video, and the silky smoothness of iOS 4 convincing you to switch from Google’s Android to Apple? Worried about moving over your personal data like contacts, finding apps, getting used to the differences? Wondering where to find help?

Relax. You’re in the the right place. Follow along after the break for everything you need to know (more properly, everything the TiPb iPhone Forums have taught us) about switching from Android to iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

(And yes, we’ll have BlackBerry, webOS, and Windows Mobile switcher guides up later this week as well).


Android to iPhone, or there and back again

Maybe you used to have an iPhone but after several months the luster wore off and Google’s relentless march of new phones — Droid, Nexus One, Incredible, Evo 4G, Droid 2, Droid x, stop us any time! — got you itching to try life on the Android side? Maybe the previous lack of multitasking made you never want to try an iPhone to begin with? It doesn’t matter. The past is the past and this is about the future — your future with iPhone 4 and iOS 4. This is about getting you from Android to 100mph on the iPhone as fast as possible. Here’s where we start.

Moving over contacts, calendars, and email

Here’s the good news: if you’re using Android chances are you’re using Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts for your personal information, and those all work really well on the iPhone. You can set them up either as an Exchange account (which uses Google Sync’s ActiveSync license) to push everything straight from the mothership to your iPhone, or set it up as a Gmail account that uses IMAP.

Since iOS 4 can handle multiple ActiveSync accounts, that’s the way we recommend you go. Just tap the Settings icon on the Hone Screen, tap Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, choose Exchange, and enter your credentials. Google even has a help page [link] if you’re not sure just what exactly to put where.

About the only things you’ll miss — and we miss them too — is a more Gmail-like mail app. iPhone Mail is a great IMAP client but Gmail does things their own way, with threads and labels and stars. You’ll get threads, but the other two just aren’t there.

If it bothers you enough, you can load up gmail.com right in the Safari web browser. Google makes the best web apps in the business and they work great in Safari (which shares the same WebKit root as Google’s own Chrome). Once you’ve logged in to Gmail, Safari will ask you to cache a few megs of mail on your iPhone — HTML5 and SQLite power! — and then you’re good to go.

What to do about Google Voice and Google Navigation

YouTube and Google search are built right into the iPhone. Enjoy. Google Voice and Google Navigation… those are harder to replace.

Now, if you’re not in the US, you probably don’t have to worry about Google Voice since it’s not international yet, and Google Navigation is just starting to spread so you may not have to worry about that either. If you’re in the US and are a big Google Voice and Google Navigation user, here’s where things get sticky — Apple hasn’t allowed Google Voice into the App Store and Google hasn’t made Google Navigation for the iPhone yet.

It’s like when mom and dad fight and the kids suffer, right? There’s a couple alternatives you can check out for each, though none are ideal — and most aren’t free.

For Google Voice you can use Google’s own web app. It’s pretty good, though obviously more limited than a native app would be. There’re also 3rd party Google Voice web apps like Black Swan and rival services like Line2.

For Google Navigation, you have the much more limited Google Maps built in, which lacks turn by turn and voice directions but is free and useful in a pinch. There are a variety of cheap, crowd-sourced navigation apps as well. The cheap ones are a mixed bag. The crowd-sourced ones make us worry that Stephen Colbert’s viewers will one day move the Empire State Building to the Cleve just for lulz, but they’re worth checking out. Motion X GPS Drive is $0.99 right now, for example [iTunes]. If you prefer to navigate with the big boys, you can also find everything from TeleNav’s online maps in AT&T and Rogers Navigator to NAVIGON’s on-board maps in MobileNavigator, to TomTom which owns their own maps. They’re all great — but they come at a price.

And in iOS 4, navigation, VoIP, and — yes — streaming music Pandora or Slacker-style can all multitask away blissfully in the background.

Finding other apps (and games).

Sure Apple doesn’t allow endless keyboards, task killers, and pinup girls into the App Store, but there are 200,000 apps anyway and almost certainly any big ticket ones you’ve come to reply on in the Android Market are there, ready and waiting for download. There are also tons of games, from the casual farmers to full-on 3D FPS. TiPb reviews several a week and we’ve got a whole iPhone Apps and Games Forum ready to help you out as well.

Root meet Jailbreak

Forget the words root and ROM. Remember the words Jailbreak and Cydia. Okay, iPhone 4 probably won’t be Jailbroken (root jail broken open to allow side-loading of unsigned apps — if you don’t know what that means, skip this section) on launch day but it probably will eventually, maybe even soon. If you’re a diehard rooter, tweaker, and customizer, you’ll want to keep your eyes peeled to our Jailbreak coverage, and more importantly — our Jailbreak Help Forum, and Jailbreak Apps, Games, and Themes Forum.

Say farewell to fracture

Seriously, you don’t have to worry much if at all about versions and hardware compatibility any more. With very few exception, iPhone apps past, present, and future will just work on your iPhone 4. Sure the screen is bigger but it’s exactly 4 times bigger at the same physical size so existing (pre-iOS 4) apps will look the same and new (post iOS 4) apps will, well frankly blow your mind.

Apple is all about user experience and they’re doing a lot of abstraction behind the scenes to make sure things look great in front of them. Enjoy.

Say hello to iTunes

A mixed blessing if ever there was one, iTunes runs okay on Mac, kludgy on Windows, but is the local sync client required to activate your iPhone 4 and to transfer large media and document files from your computer to your phone.

You can do a lot of things OTA (over the air), including syncing all your personal data via ActiveSync (including Google Sync) or MobileMe, download apps, and buy or rent iTunes music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, etc. (20MB or under over 3G, any size over Wi-Fi). You can find apps that let you access your Google Docs, DropBox, Box.net, and other online storage. You can even convert and stream content on the fly with apps like AirSharing [iTunes]. But at some point, be it to install a software update like iOS 4.1 (probably due this fall) or backup your data, you’re going to need to plug in to iTunes. So 2007, we know. If it’s any consolation, Apple should release iTunes.com at some point…

Say WTH to interruptive notifications and lack of widgets

For all the huge usability advantages iOS 4 has over Android 2.2 — and make no mistake they’re still huge — notifications and widgets are sorely lacking.

You get one notification popup at a time that you have to view or close before you can resume what you were doing (or about to do) and once you close it — or another notification pops up on top of it — it’s gone forever.

Likewise, aside from the orientation lock and music controls in the fast app switcher UI, there’s not widgets. None for the lock screen, none for the home screen.

Hopefully Apple will fix these omissions in a future update. (Because we know Google’s planning on fixing the usability.)

More Android to iPhone help and information

If you haven’t already, check out our complete iOs 4 feature walkthrough. There’s an incredible amount of stuff in iOS 4 and you can save yourself some serious time cribbing off of us.

If you need help, or have a story to share, check out TiPb’s iPhone forum — we’ve got a special switching from Android to iPhone 4 thread going just for you!

And if we forgot anything or just plain got something wrong, let us know and we’ll add it or fix it.

Switching from Android to iPhone 4? Here’s what you need to know is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
 
Re: Switching from Android to iPhone 4? Here’s what you need to know



everywhere you go


 
iPhone 4 review roll in…

iPhone 4 review roll in…
Posted by Divine on Jun 22, 2010 in iPhone | Edit |
Link

Here are a few choice snippets from some of the high-profile reviews coming out today:

Walt Mossberg / The Wall Street Journal:
I’ve been testing the iPhone 4 for more than a week. In both hardware and software, it is a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS.

It has some downsides and limitations – most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S., which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor. I’ll get into that below. But, overall, Apple has delivered a big, well-designed update that, in my view, keeps it in the lead in the smartphone wars.

David Pogue / The New York Times:
Despite the strong initial, positive reaction, this must still be a nerve-racking time to be Apple; the iPhone is no longer the only worthy contender. Phones running Google‘s Android software are gaining rave reviews and packing in features that iPhone owners can only envy. The Android app store is ballooning, multiple phone makers are competing, and Google updates the software several times a year. Apple releases only one new model a year, so the new iPhone had better be pretty amazing to compete.

It is.

Ed Baig / USA Today:
The new iPhone 4 I’ve been testing for about a week and a half – along with the major refresh of the mobile operating system software at the core of recent models – demonstrates once again why Apple’s handset is the one to beat, even as it faces fierce competition from phones based on Google’s Android platform, among others.

Xeni Jardin / Boing Boing:
The fourth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device – not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad. Yes, the notable features with iPhone 4 – both the device and the iOS4, which came out yesterday in advance of the iPhone itself – are mostly tweaks. But what tweaks they are: Apple’s focus on improvement is as much key to the quality of its products as innovation. But there’s one flaw it can’t completely eliminate: the unreliable quality of calls placed over AT&T, which remains the iPhone’s only U.S. carrier.

Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package — fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is — we think it’s the cream of the current crop.

Stay tuned over the next several days as we continue to cover the iPhone 4 launch and all of the latest developments.
 
Last edited:
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

Good job Apple. This is of course before the big dogs from Google hit next month.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

From Engadget:

We're not going to beat around the bush -- in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package -- fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is -- we think it's the cream of the current crop. We won't argue that a lot of this is a matter of taste -- some people will just prefer the way Android or Symbian works to the iPhone, and others will be on the lookout for a hardware keyboard or a particular asset that the iPhone 4 lacks -- but in terms of the total picture, it's tough to deny that Apple has moved one step past the competition with this phone. Of course, in the hyper-accelerated smartphone market where the Next Big Thing seems to always be just around the corner, it's anyone's guess how long they keep that edge.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

Dude, I can not hear you with a Dick in your mouth with dreams of a cum stained iPhone on your horizon. I am proud that you were one of the many to give up Nextel walkie talkie sex chirps to graduate to iphone. On the 24th will you be getting matching Knee pads for your iphone Case? I predict nigga's like you being posted on youtube as fool on chat roulette talking about "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN GET FACETIME WITH ANYONE! DON'T JUDGE ME!"

:confused: u gotta be bout 16 yrs old.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…


LOL, Meaning Google copies all the positive with the new iphone, repackage it and call it something else in their next release.

How is froyo working out for them now? oh yeah that is right they are still delayed. And Flash has been shown to be more of an issue still. Enjoying the flash banners and random video clips.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

Looks good...I think the reviewers were fair, but they minimized/glossed over its weaknesses...but that's always the case with Apple. Its limitations still bother me, but it's a damn good phone if you don't care about all that.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

LOL, Meaning Google copies all the positive with the new iphone, repackage it and call it something else in their next release.

How is froyo working out for them now? oh yeah that is right they are still delayed. And Flash has been shown to be more of an issue still. Enjoying the flash banners and random video clips.

froyo was announced less than a month ago, and flash is already on 2.1 able to play tube sites.


38 hour battery time is amazing though, most of the android hackers are too worried about overclocking the EVO than helping out its battery.
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

interestingly the real reviewers were fair and balanced with their reviews mossberg and progue while apple fans and supporters are fair and will call apple out without a problem and give props to the rivals.... but engadget is apple jr with the fanboys....dude even said they'll give better reviews once the engadget team gets their i4's...how come u didn't post the review from boing boing?
Boing Boing
"The fourth incarnation of Apple's iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device-not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad. Yes, the notable features with iPhone 4-both the device and the iOS4, which came out yesterday in advance of the iPhone itself-are mostly tweak
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

LOL, Meaning Google copies all the positive with the new iphone, repackage it and call it something else in their next release.

How is froyo working out for them now? oh yeah that is right they are still delayed. And Flash has been shown to be more of an issue still. Enjoying the flash banners and random video clips.

r u stupid?

mms android before iphone
video calling android before iphone
wallpaper android before iphone
notification system android beats iphone
os integration with 3rd party apps android beats iphone

froyo isn't even officially out yet so discussing it is moot...
flash 10.1 for mobiles isn't out yet b/c froyo isn't out yet its already been reported both are not ready yet so what is your bitch ass talking about?

damn u r trying really hard to be divine's apprentice talking madd hyperbole and embellishing things...
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

Looks good...I think the reviewers were fair, but they minimized/glossed over its weaknesses...but that's always the case with Apple. Its limitations still bother me, but it's a damn good phone if you don't care about all that.

don't pay attention to the apple fanboy sites...mossberg and progue are fair..cnet was even fair but techcrunch and engadget are super iphanboy sites...
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

r u stupid?

mms android before iphone
video calling android before iphone
wallpaper android before iphone
notification system android beats iphone
os integration with 3rd party apps android beats iphone

froyo isn't even officially out yet so discussing it is moot...
flash 10.1 for mobiles isn't out yet b/c froyo isn't out yet its already been reported both are not ready yet so what is your bitch ass talking about?

damn u r trying really hard to be divine's apprentice talking madd hyperbole and embellishing things...

No one promotes like AgentCreed.
The only function that I can say that iphone is missing is the seamless CLoud syncing that Google offers right out of the box over Mobile me. Other then that aaaahhhhh yeah this is always a rush to one up for a market that Apple Created.

App store creation- APPLE
Touch screen UI DONE CORRECTLY FROM JUMP- APPLE
Accelerometer in todays smart phones- APPLE
GOOGLE MAPS on smartphones--- ok that was blackberry,but GOOGLE MAPS Visually appealing --APPLE!!

Everyone knew that forward facing camera was a game changer. built into the phone and not using an app done very well-- APPLE
 
Re: iPhone 4 review roll in…

No one promotes like AgentCreed.
The only function that I can say that iphone is missing is the seamless CLoud syncing that Google offers right out of the box over Mobile me. Other then that aaaahhhhh yeah this is always a rush to one up for a market that Apple Created.

App store creation- APPLE
Touch screen UI DONE CORRECTLY FROM JUMP- APPLE
Accelerometer in todays smart phones- APPLE
GOOGLE MAPS on smartphones--- ok that was blackberry,but GOOGLE MAPS Visually appealing --APPLE!!

Everyone knew that forward facing camera was a game changer. built into the phone and not using an app done very well-- APPLE

Facetime can only goto Facetime over wifi.

The fact that it is using a app that means its open to developers so any other app can use it (Skype).
 
Back
Top