Some fourteen months ago, I bought myself a shiny new Nexus S.

In the year that followed, I grew to seriously love this phone. It has been rooted, tweaked, screwed up, nearly bricked, and updated ad nauseum. Whenever I feel I want a “new” phone, all it takes is some research and some time to set it up with a new ROM and/or launcher and/or launcher theme, and it’s ready to go.

And then on Friday, it gave me some very, very bad words:

Safe Mode.

I do not know why, or how, but my dear Nexus S booted up in Safe Mode on Friday morning, and it would not leave.

There are various instructions on the web for leaving Safe Mode. All were tried. I rebooted. I removed the battery. I booted with the up volume pressed. The down volume pressed.

Eventually I completely wiped the phone and installed a stock ICS ROM. Problem “solved”.

And it’s a good thing, too – I very much do not want to buy a new phone right now; anybody who willingly upgrades their phone right now is a bit of a fool.

The reason? 4G.

Waiting on the Fourth Generation

My wife bought the latest version of the iPad. She bought the “4G” model – or what was being called the 4G model at the time. Now Apple markets it as WiFi + Cellular in the UK.

Why? Because we’re backwards here. While the rest of the developed world uses LTE (or other competing) technology to have a so-called 4G network (these standards actually fail to meet the 4G standard, as a general rule), the UK is lagging behind in having these faster networks. In fact while the latest news indicates that progress is “speeding up”, you will still see a conspicuous lack of a schedule for the introduction of a 4G standard to Britain.

And until the technology is rolled out, nobody knows the version of the standard that will be used. So any device that might be designed to handle a 4G (or 4G precursor) technology would not necessarily work on a British solution.

So I’m glad that I did not have to buy a new phone this past weekend – I’m hoping to hold on to my little Nexus for a little while longer. I’d suggest you do the same.

Our third, final, and perhaps most important article of Android week takes a look at the Android marketplace.

For all that our smartphones do out of the box — phone, GPS, email, music, internet — it is really their ability to do seemingly anything (and everything) else which is their greatest feature. The degree to which this is possible depends almost entirely on our ability to load additional programs onto the device.

Apple began this trend with their excellent App Store. Google has countered this with the Android Marketplace. After years using the former and a week-and-a-half with the latter, we take a look at the differences.

The Numbers

If you browse the Internet looking at comparisons of, say, the iPhone 4 and the Google Nexus S, you will find seemingly no end of reviews that give the edge to Apple on the virtue of numbers alone. Apple has over twice the number of applications, they say, so their store is better.

The logical fallacy here should be clear — more and better are two very different things. For instance, amongst those 350,000+ applications available to iPhone users are many an application that simulates fart noises. It is hard to be convinced that this makes for a better store.

Obviously numbers do matter. An application store with ten applications, for instance, would quite clearly not have the variety needed. But there is probably little difference in having one thousand, ten thousand, or one million options for your Twitter application — the average user is likely to narrow their choices quickly to a half dozen or so, and pick what appears to be the best out of that list.

With over 150,000 applications in the Android Marketplace, we at the Big Bad Blog feel that Android easily clears this hurdle — after all, two years ago Apple’s App Store had a mere 35,000 applications available, and we never had a problem finding what we were looking for.

The Wild West

The second trope that seems to be pulled out quite often is mention that the Google Marketplace is like “the Wild West”. For instance, to quote CNet:

The Android Market is like the Wild West, containing a mix of the best, worst, smartest and dumbest apps, jumbled up in a way that can be hard to sort through.

We are never sure what people mean by “Wild West” when they say it in reviews. We suspect they don’t either — it has simply become a trope. Certainly we do not think of “a mix of the best, worst, smartest and dumbest” as the “Wild West”. We think of bad Will Smith movies, Clint Eastwood, shoot-outs and the Oregon trail. We have our doubts that you are likely to die of dysentery through the Android Marketplace.

Still, CNet’s points are worth talking about.

The Best. The best applications available for Android are, quite simply, better than the best applications available for the iPhone. The folks at Google don’t care if you’re replacing a core functionality of the phone with your App. They do not stop your application from running in the background, or playing with certain parts of the phone. They do not prevent significant changes to your phones look, feel and functionality.

All of this means that applications on the phone can simply do more.

The Worst. The worst applications available for Android are, quite simply, worse than the worst applications available for the iPhone. Google places no controls on what can be sold in the Marketplace, which means that things that are simply too tasteless (or too poorly coded) to make it through Apple’s review process are available.

The Smartest. We do not know what “the smartest” means. Obviously smart applications are better because they can do more (see “the best”, above), except when they’re really trojans stealing your identity. This might actually mean that the iPhone’s good applications are “smarter”, though, as they have to deal with more restrictions, and require more creativity to perform some of the same tasks.

The Dumbest. Again, we do not know what this means. Certainly Apple’s store has plenty of fart noises in it. We think that both stores manage to reach the lowest common denominator pretty well.

Jumbled up. This is one of the two very valid critiques of the Google Marketplace — Apple has done a much better job at helping their users to find things.

The Real Differences

Organisation

The Apple App Store is far, far, far better organised than the Google Marketplace. While we spent many an hour with our iPhone browsing through the App Store to see what might come up, not only do we not do the same with our Android device — we have no desire to do so. A short-lived (and quickly aborted) attempt to interact with it as we did with the App Store was more than enough for us.

Instead, we decide what Apps we want on our new phone, and go directly to them.

Functionality

Android is a platform. Phone manufacturers (and users) are allowed to load it onto any phone they want, and make any modifications they want along the way.

The iPhone is a product. Only Apple is allowed to make phones that run their mobile Operating System, and access to the phone from a personal computer is forced to take place through custom-made Apple software.

This is reflected in the functionality permitted in the applications for their devices. Android is seemingly infinitely customizable. If there is something your phone cannot do, it is because the application has not been written yet, not because the application is not available. On the iPhone, everything needs to fit within a managed Apple experience.

The end result is that Android applications can simply do more. Synchronize over WiFi, for example.

Danger

The flip-side of the increased flexibility and functionality that is available through the Android Marketplace is that the applications are not always benign. With no oversight of the applications, and the potential to interact with any other part of your phone, there is an increased wariness when evaluating an App from Google’s Marketplace.

This is, of course, healthy. Apple’s devices have had their own issues with applications that collect (and sell) user data, and perhaps a bit more due diligence ought to also be taken with purchases there. But the increased functionality and decreased oversight puts the onus on the end user to ensure that his or her downloads do not compromise the system.

Options

The final difference, of course, is that Android users do not have to use the Google Marketplace. They are free to use the Amazon App Store, or the Opera App Store, or from any other place they can find that wants to sell them (or give them away for free).

With the shortcomings being largely specific to the Marketplace, and not to to the platform itself, one can find an App Store for their Android device that pre-screens applications and/or is organised in a pleasing manner for browsing.

The Impact

So how do these differences impact our behaviour? In a very surprising way.

Every Apple Application we ever bought was done so via the iPhone interface. We would browse to find something, or search for a term, read the descriptions and reviews, and make a choice. It was simple, self-contained and easy.

With the Google Marketplace, we approach things very differently. We begin by identifying something we want — “a Twitter client”, “an RSS Reader”, “a music player”.

We then search on Google — via our PC — for information. Recommendations, reviews. We check the application-maker’s website. Do they have a forum? How do they respond to feedback? Do they seem trustworthy?

We then find the application in the Android Marketplace, and review the permissions it needs from our phone. Are all the permissions necessary, or does it include permissions that are not needed for the functionality described in the application?

Finally, we download the App from the Marketplace.

Our conclusions

In the end, we expect that the Apple App Store and Android marketplace both appeal to different people.

The Apple version will appeal to those who are happy and satisfied with the Apple experience. Those who want whimsical things on their phone, enjoy browsing for them, and — while they may care that their phone has functionality — are unconcerned with limitations to that functionality. Those that prefer reasonable security with little thought.

Others — such as ourselves — get annoyed by the accumulation of silly, rarely-used applications that begin to pile up after multiple browsing sessions. If restrictions irk you, and a bit of research invigorates you, the Android Marketplace feels better. It discourages browsing — you need to know what you want, and go straight to it.

On the other hand, you can get anything you want.

We are of the second kind, and find the Android Marketplace a preferable place. For the former kind, there are other Android stores out there — but ultimately, if you want to be living within a managed mobile experience (rather than building your own), you are likely to find more success with Apple. It is, after all, their specialty.

Welcome to day two of Android week — with only three days between bank holidays here in the UK and an unusual amount of excitement that accompanies a new gadget, it is looking like we might do an all-Android week here at the Big Bad Blog.

Yesterday, we took a look at our general impressions, and gave a comparison between our new Nexus S and the iPhone. In it, we mentioned that our big surprise was the quality of our music experience. However, getting there was not a smooth ride — today, we give you the full story.

Our goal

Our goal is simple — to replace the iTunes/iPhone functionality with our Google Nexus S.

In particular, we note that our music collection is in excess of 36 gigabytes in size. This is more than twice the storage space available on our phone — and we only want to fill half that storage space with music. This means that we need some method of rotating music in and out.

The method we have used in the past is that of the smart playlist. We have the 4GB of music that has been played least recently, and 4GB of music that we have given high ratings to and has been played least recently.

For this to work, we need to be able to set up similar playlists for synchronization. Ideally, we would also import our existing ratings and playcounts, so we are not starting these playlists from scratch, but we are willing to put up with starting these over from the beginning for the sake of an improved experience.

Stage I: doubleTwist

If you have spent years as an Apple iPod/iPhone customer, you have your music collection on iTunes. And if you are switching to an Android device after all this time, ditching iTunes sounds like a wonderful idea — the only problem is how to do so without losing everything you put into the program. Playlists, ratings, playcounts. If you love music, this is important to you.

Enter doubleTwist.

Every single website that reviews such things has nothing but positive things to say about doubleTwist. It imports your iTunes library, stats, playlists and all. It synchronizes between the PC and Android versions of the software. The most wonderful thing in the world.

I should have known better — there is no way that every single website would agree on such things. Is it lazy reporting, repeating a press release? Is it payola? We have no way of knowing here at the Big Bad Blog.

What we do know is that when we installed it on our PC, it immediately located and imported our entire iTunes library. It nabbed the songs, the stats, the playlists … but left out the “smart” part of the smart playlists. They were no longer auto-updating.

That’s OK, we thought. Let’s sync, and figure out the smart part later.

So we set the phone to synchronize, and walked away.

We never expected an 8GB data transfer to be fast, but it shouldn’t take three hours. Three hours later, and a half dozen photos (and no songs) had moved to the phone.

We cancelled the sync, and uninstalled.

Stage II: Winamp

Having experienced failure from the laziest available approach, we decided to look a bit deeper, and found that Winamp was still around.

Our favourite music player of the late 90s, Winamp still exists, is still updated, and now comes with an Android version. What’s more, the PC and Android versions will synchronize! What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, a couple of things.

First, the synchronization only happens one way. Playcounts – which are integral to our rotation system – do not synchronize back to the computer from the phone, to update the playlist.

Second, while a “smart playlist” is available in Winamp, it is not called a playlist, and so will not synchronize as part of an “automatic sync”. This means that the sync must be done manually.

Third, the manual sync process is a pain in the butt, having to detect the device, select the songs to be synchronized onto the device, and then synching … which (as mentioned above) does not even cause a proper music rotation.

By this time next year, we fully expect the folks at Winamp will have figured things up, and that our search might have ended here. But in 2011, we needed to perform our second uninstall.

Stage III: iSyncr

At this point, we were despairing. All along, we had really wanted to give MediaMonkey a shot as an iTunes replacement for playlist management and PC-based playback, but the lack of a paired music player gave us pause.

Now, we decided to look at synchronization as its own puzzle. And we found iSyncr.

iSyncr is the first application that we have found in our hunt that works like a dream. The music just copies across, without a hitch. The stats on played music copies back to the PC, without any problem. The only issue is that iSyncr synchronizes iTunes playlists.

iTunes is dead. Long live iTunes.

We can live with this, though — iTunes is now the place our music collection is stored, rather than the one and only door to our phone. We became comfortable with this idea surprisingly quickly. And we have music synchronization.

Stage IV: PowerAMP

Everything was synchronized. We are now listening to music on our new Android phone, … but … there’s still a problem.

It seems that the native application that Google provides to play music is a bit … shitty. The sound quality was notably worse than what I was used to having with my iPhone. This was disappointing. We set to research alternate players.

Most players appear to be alternate front-ends to the same native music player. Some of them were very cool, in fact. And then there’s PowerAMP.

PowerAMP lists the formats it supports on its website, suggesting it uses its own codecs to decode the files, and it has a graphics equalizer. And the sound that comes through my headphones from the Nexus S is superior to that which has come from any MP3 player before it.

And that’s how I found myself leaving Apple, but sticking with iTunes.

I have now had a week to play with my new Google Nexus S phone, and given the attention that was lavished upon the decision, we thought that we would let you know our first impressions.

A few things to keep in mind:

• We are, in general, comparing the Google Nexus S to the iPhone
• Our iPhone was a 3GS. We will try to keep performance in perspective, as the iPhone 4 clearly ought to outperform our old phone.
• We try to remain neutral, but keep in mind that we are not fond of Apple in this corner of the Internet, and are a bit excited about a new toy.

Phone Build

The phone itself is fantastic.

It’s thinner, lighter and has a superior screen to the iPhone 3GS — we’re not sure about the iPhone 4, on any of these counts — and the curved screen makes it feel a bit more like a phone when using it as such. We are not holding a very expensive brick to our face any longer.

And the phone bits? Wonderful. Much better signal strength, much better sound quality.

It’s almost as if it’s a Smartphone built by a phone manufacturer, rather than an iPod with call-making capabilities built by a computer company.

The one advantage the iPhone has, however, is that the Nexus is lacking in heft — we are still left with the distinct impression that the phone will not handle abuse as well as Apple’s did.

Judging phone elements:
Style … Nexus!
Signal … Nexus!
Call Quality … Nexus!
Screen … Tie!
Heft … iPhone!
Accessibility … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Music

We knew that Samsung would make a better phone than Apple, though, in terms of pure phone-ness. What about the music?

Music sync and playback is, to us, one of the most important features on the phone, and the biggest cause for concern when switching over — for all the annoyances, iTunes synchronizes with the iPhone pretty smoothly (or it did, once upon a time), and the iPhone is based upon the iPod — a music-playing device.

After some experimentation — the story of which is long enough to fill its own article — we settled on iSyncr and PowerAMP.

iSyncr enables synchronization over WiFi with iTunes. This has been flawless, and makes synchronizing music easier than it ever was with the iPhone. Not only are there no wires required, but changing the synchronization settings are a breeze, once everything has been set up.

The native Android music player is pretty horrendous, however, so we downloaded PowerAMP and found that suddenly our music collection was sounding better than it ever had on the iPhone.

Judging music elements:
Sync … Nexus!
Playback … Nexus!
Initial setup … iPhone!
Modifying setup … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Social Networking

Music was an expected weak point for the Nexus, Social Networking an expected strong point. The key to a social network, after all, is to have people participating in it. With Android being the most popular handset Operating System and an open Android market, surely it must be bursting with excellent and innovative apps. While we found success in locating a Twitter client, we were also left with the impression that the iPhone has a greater range of options, application-wise.

We started with Twitter. Our Desktop Twitter client is TweetDeck, and our iPhone client was TweetList, which is not available on Android.

We decided to try TweetDeck for Android, and were pleasantly surprised. We had previously tried their iPhone application and found it lacking. Either they have redesigned their mobile client since then, or have completely separate design teams for the iPhone and Android. The Android Tweetdeck application is excellent — it puts all my networks into a single feed, and allows me to selectively update to Twitter, Facebook and/or FourSquare. (I believe they do LinkedIn as well, if you’re into that sort of thing).

TweetList is a wonderful iPhone application, with the most intuitive interface I have ever used on a Twitter application — or perhaps any mobile application — and is sorely missed for that. But the extra TweetDeck features are fantastic, as we no longer feel the need to have separate Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare applications on our phone.

Judging:
Choice … iPhone!
Functionality … Nexus!
Intuitiveness … iPhone!

OVERALL … iPhone! (by a whisker, so much here is application-dependent).

Other common uses

So there are other common smartphone uses here, which did not seem to group well, and we didn’t want to put elsewhere.

email … iPhone! The native Google application is surprisingly awful. The best option available appears to be K9, which is pretty good, but still does not quite match up to the Mail app that comes with the iPhone.

Maps and Navigation … Nexus! This should come as little surprise, as the iPhone uses Google Maps. Google happens to do Google Maps better. Offline maps and TFL Journeyplanner applications seem on par with the iPhone, though we have had little chance to press them into use thus far.

RSS Reader … Nexus! Back when we were setting up our iPhone, it took us weeks — literally weeks! — and more downloaded apps than I can remember before we settled on Reeder, which met all our reading needs. It took us 24 hours and two downloads to find NewsRob, which does everything Reeder does, but does it smoother, faster and more pleasingly.

Random observations

Beyond the above, we did note a few random things that bear mentioning.

NFC … Tie! A tie? The Nexus HAS Near Field Communication, the iPhone does not. But it hardly matters, because there are absolutely no functions for NFC at the moment, so we just turn it off so that it doesn’t drain the battery at all. Our dreams of swiping our phone to get on the tube, or pay for a coffee, are probably still outside the lifetime of this phone.

Accessibility … Nexus! It’s fairly evident that one of the benefits of Android is access to the device — users can change the battery, access the filesystem, and other such things. This plays out into a larger advantage than a plug-and-player like myself would have thought. Something as simple as showing how much each application has drained the battery is informative and useful, and Android’s policy of indicating what permissions are given to each installed application helps shape our choices more than we anticipated.

Accessories … iPhone! One thing that we didn’t anticipate was the dearth of phone accessories that would be available. Every phone store sells iPhone cases — and then there’s the Apple store. If you have a Nexus, good luck finding a case at the phone store, nevermind a choice of cases. We bought the Tech 21 case, only to find that it wasn’t actually designed with the curved body of the Nexus S in mind — it just had the right height, width, depth and cut-outs. No good. Our most promising option for a case right now is to order one from America. That just seems wrong.

In their pocket … Tie! However, if you are trying to get out under the thumb of Apple — as we were — Google may feel more free, but that’s not necessarily the case. Our phone’s information is backed up on Google’s servers. Our contacts are Google Contacts. Our photos are synched via Picassa, Google’s cloud photo service.

The great advertiser in the sky knows more about us than ever before.

Overall verdict

So, a week into our new Android life, are we happy with the decision we made? Do we still feel that the Nexus S is superior to the iPhone 4?

Yes, and yes.

We find it nicer to look at, nicer to make calls with, and nicer to listen to music and read with. Its in-built functionality is considerably weaker than that on the iPhone, but unlike the iPhone, these functions can be easily upgraded from the market.

And that’s where the real satisfaction comes in. Both systems are easily extensible, through third party applications. But Apple’s insistence that applications are not permitted to compete with the core Apple-built products on the phone means that upgrading is difficult to impossible.

We would choose Android again in a heartbeat.