Android phones take a power trip
You know the old techie joke, right? If you don’t like the Android phones on the market, just wait a minute.There are dozens of Android phones, and newer, better ones appear every few months.
Google subscribes to the Microsoft Windows scheme: Write the software, and let other companies build the phones.The result is a lot of choice, but also a lot of fragmentation. There is no one Android phone. Some models can be updated to new Android software, some can’t. A certain app might or might not run on your particular version. That master plan differs quite a bit from the iPhone’s.
Apple designs ‘the whole widget,’ as Steve Jobs used to say: both the software and the phone. The result is clean, reliable and consistent – but you’re limited to the features Apple wants to give you.
For example, if you want a 4G phone (one that runs on the new, very fast Internet networks in big cities), you’re out of luck. And a new iPhone, accompanied by a major software release, comes out only once a year, or less often. In any case, there’s a lot of news in Androidland. The three biggest players are Samsung, Motorola and HTC, and all three are offering beautiful marquee Android phones. All three are Verizon 4G phones.
These phones are whopping big; that’s the trend these days. You can almost fit an entire iPhone in just the screen area of these Android monsters. Big is great for maps, movies, photos and websites – less so for holding up to your ear on a call. All three phones have front and back cameras, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. On the other hand, they come preinstalled with Verizon promotional apps that you can hide, but can’t remove.
The HTC Rezound ($200 with two-year contract) comes with a pair of Dr Dre Beats in-ear headphones. Those, plus matching software, give music playback extra clarity and bass. This thickish phone was the first in the United States with a true high-definition screen (1280 by 720 pixels, 4.3 inches) – sharper than even the iPhone’s Retina screen.
Then there’s the expansive Motorola Droid Razr Maxx ($300), whose claim to fame is its beefy battery. This may be the first 4G phone that gets you through a full day, or even longer, on a single charge. Yet it’s still as thin as an iPhone.
But the Samsung Galaxy Nexus ($300) might be the most interesting phone. Not because of the phone itself, though it’s fine: 32 gigabytes of storage (no card slot), fast processor, removable battery, 1280 x 720-pixel hi-def screen, so-so 5-megapixel camera.
ICS phones don’t have a row of physical navigation buttons anymore (like Home, Back and Menu); instead, they’re images on the screen. That eats away at the screen space, of course, but they disappear when you need the room – say, when watching movies or taking photos. And they rotate with the phone now, too, so they are always upright. The Motorola and HTC phones reviewed here will get upgrades to ICS later this year.
Plenty of ICS features play iPhone catch-up. Now, for example, you can fire up the camera directly from the Lock screen. There’s a Dock at the bottom of the screen for your most-used apps. You can edit photos and videos right on the phone. The email apps show the first few words of the message bodies. A spelling checker underlines questionable words. You can create folders by dragging one app atop another. The new address-book app collects your friends’ information from Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus (though not Facebook, weirdly enough). All of their photos and news blurbs rest in one handy place, just as on Windows Phone.
The Web browser lets you save Web pages for reading later when you’re offline; offers a stealth mode that leaves no History list; and lets you request the full version of a site if a subpar cellphone version is being forced on you. Android’s speech recognition isn’t as accurate as Siri on iPhone, and it’s still just for dictation – it doesn’t take Siri commands like “What does my schedule look like a week from tomorrow?” But now the words fly onto the screen as you’re saying them; you no longer have to wait until you stop talking for the transcription to appear.
