[cpoff]

You two should take the educational debate up via private message, and leave it out of this thread.

Thanks,
Curt

[Brianary]

Seems like a much better phone for anyone that wants Flash support (in October), a video camera, a removable/swappable battery, a 5MP camera with flash, a regular earphone jack, a microSD slot, no app store hijinx, haptic feedback for the on-screen keyboard, support for open formats like Ogg, a brighter and more readable AMOLED screen, longer battery life (1500 mAh? + AMOLED), a development environment other than Objective-C on a Mac (as long as Java is OK), or service from someone other than AT&T.
Several of those features are important to me, at least, and perhaps others.
I do wonder about the cost…

[eebclee]

The megapixel race on cell phones is absurd. (I say this as someone who designs scientific cameras for a living.) I don't beleive I've seen a cell phone camera capable of more than at best 2 real megapixels of image resolution. Using megapixels as a measure of a camera might have made sense for digital point and shoot cameras back when the individual pixels were huge and there was a race to 1 megapixel. Now the pixels are so small that it's just splitting up the same number of photons (a small number in the case of a cell phone's tiny optics) between more pixels, each pixel gets fewer photons and the noise increases (both photon shot noise, since you have fewer photons, and the inherent readout noise per pixel, since you have more pixels). And the optics are incapable of delivering enough resolution for that many pixels to matter. So the further over 2 megapixels you go, the more in-phone processing you need (reducing battery life), the more storage space you need for the larger image, and the worse the image data itself is. Pixel size, or effective megapixel resolution, would be better measures. I know one industry group that has been pushing for an "effective megapixel" type rating, but the companies themselves are opposed.



So don't be fooled into thinking a 5 megapixel cellphone is anything like a 5 megapixel point and shoot camera. A point and shoot (with much larger optics and a much larger sensor) can produce good 5 megapixel images. A 5 megapixel cell phone camera is highly questionsable, and likely to have worse image quality than a 2 megapixel cel phone camera.

[Brianary]

I'd be perfectly willing to stipulate that the camera quality may not be better than the iPhone (rather more reluctant to agree that it could be noticably worse, particularly with the flash). I think you've made far too many assumptions to support your final statement, myself.

Regardless, the camera isn't really one of the most important features on that list, to me.

[eebclee]

This wasn't an "iPhone is better than x other phone" argument, please don't take it that way. You won't find me defending any crappy cell phone camera, they are all bad, it's just a matter of how bad. (Disclaimer: I mainly use SLR cameras, digital and film.) As I said, I design cameras for a living, you can find a number of articles on the topic. All my assumptions are based on the fundamental physical limitations of the system. All the detectors are made out of silicon, and silicon can only hold so many electrons in a given volume. Smaller pixels means less electrons, fewer total counts possible, less data and a lower data to noise ratio. One example from the dSLR world: when Canon introduced the 15mp 50D to replace the 10mp 40D, a number of revivers noted that the new 15mp camera showed measurably lower dynamic range than the older camera. The difference was enough that many suggested buying the older lower megapixel camera instead of the newer one.


You are right that to a limited extent the flash would help, although flash photos with low quality flashes have their own set of quality issues.



I didn't initially address the rest of the features you list because I wasn't really interested in getting into an iPhone vs. Android thing, this one caught my attention because it's a pet peeve. I'm annoyed that the engineers in these comapnies can't get their marketing departments to stop pushing a number which now usually indicates the opposite (in terms of quality) from what they lead consumers to think it means.



But as for the rest . . .I don't think you can really compare these with an arbitrary list of features. If one of those features is critical to you, you'll go with the phone that has it, end of discussion, no point fussing about it. But some of the items on your list may be more perceived problems based on an arbitrary list than experienced problems. Personally, I had a G1, I really wanted to like it. In the end I wasn't crazy about the hardware, I have really high hopes for the software but as is it needs some work. As you and this article indicate, better hardware is on the way. As for software, if the iPhone did not exist, Android would be the best smartphone OS out there (ignoring the Palm Pre which I don't know enough about yet) -- we've been stuck with amazingly crappy smartphones for so long, it's nice to finally have a few nice phone OS choices.



Having used both, personally I find the iPhone OS much more stable and usable than Android -- to the extent that I just finally bought an iPhone despite my strong dislike of AT&T. (I'll likely pay to switch to another carrier as soon as any other carrier supports the iPhone.) I really hope Google continues to put serious effort into Android. And I really hope they get over whatever is keeping them from enabling multi-touch -- if they're concerned about Microsoft and Apple's multi-touch patents, they're in a better position than just about anyone else to challenge those.



Your other points, I wasn't sure if you were comparing to the G1 or iPhone. The iPhone 3gs has video. While a swappable battery hasn't been an issue for me -- even in my Razr it was a pain to swap batteries so I got used to other solutions -- this is something that annoys me about iPods and iPhones. Although arguably it should allow them to fit a larger battery in there or make the phone smaller. But if you find swapping batteries to be the best solution, then the iPhone is not the phone for you. The iPhone has a regular headphone jack (I couldn't beleive the G1 didn't!). As for a microSD slot, like a swappable battery that would add to the phone's size, and the iPhone has kept up with what's available in fast microSD memory (I had trouble getting as much memory as I would have liked for my G1, I could only get it in the form of the slower grades of microSD cards). A minimum of 32GB memory was one limitation that kept me form buying an iPhone until now. Apple's app store has its annoyances, but overall seems to be thriving -- there are 50,000 apps on Apple's app store compared to somewhere between 2,300 (last number I can find) to 5,000 (I though I read this somewhere but can't find it now) in Android Market. This likely has more to do there being around 25 million iPhones on the street now compared to a little over 1 million android phones. If you are developing for yourself you can choose your favorite platform, if you are developing to make a living you work with what you have too. I've never had trouble reading the screen on my ipod Touch. And as for haptic feedback, I find the visual feedback to be just fine where most haptic feedback implementations I just find annoying. But maybe someone will come up with a good implementation.



On your last point (AT&T) as I've mentioned above I totally agree with you on that. I've always been happy with T-Mobile. I was even reasonably happy with Verizon until their business model led them to start crippling phones -- In my experience, traveling to several very remote locations for work (with coworkers with phones from other carriers) no one else's coverage compared to Verizon. AT&T is infamous for poor customer service, and surveys have repeatedly shown that Apple's choice of AT&T as their only US carrier has hurt iPhone sales. (I for one would have bought one 2 years ago if I could have gotten one on T-Mobile.) At least hopefully this will give Google some room to bring Android to maturity with a little less competition than they would otherwise have.

[Brianary]

[WOT hits for 38 points of damage]

I understand your points, and agree with most of them. Clearly some of our feature preference or priorities are different (although I wouldn't necessarily call them arbitrary).
* I don't know if the silicon volume is identical between the phones, but obviously neither of us care that much about the camera stuff. It is nice to have something passable if you don't have a real camera, but my phone-camera expectations are pretty low.
* It's cool that the iPhone now does video and has a real headphone jack (not to mention the sideways on-screen keyboard).
* I don't think you can compare the current iPhone to the earlier version of Android any more effectively than I was at comparing the older iPhone to the newer Android.
* The number of apps doesn't really convince me. I need very few flatulence apps, but would probably like access to the EFF feed app that was pulled. Besides, I suspect (if Linux is any indication) that the open system will have far more apps in the long run. The better Android hardware coming out this year could, one could reasonably assume, cause a surge in apps.
* The AMOLED screen really is undeniably superior. I don't doubt that you can read your iPhone, but this is brighter and more readable while still drawing less power!
* I'm not really that motivated by the haptic feedback, never having used it.
* A swappable battery and swappable memory are both pretty important to me. I haven't really used anything for which microSD speed would matter, though. As for removable batteries increasing size, the Android phone in this article is smaller than the similar iPhone with a smaller battery, so Apple may not be capitalizing on that like they should. It sounds much more like locking out third party solutions to keep prices artificially high to me.
I work in an office with several happy iPhone owners, and I can certainly see what they like about them. Currently the iPhone is the obvious choice for gaming (and quite a bit besides), but I don't really use iTunes, which seems to be the major point of entry, and I tend to prefer being able to do anything I want with a device. Locks turn me off.

[eebclee]

It was lunch, I was bored. (I'm not sure what my excuse is now.)



And sorry if it sounded like I was saying your entire list was arbitrary, I didn't mean to imply that.



The depth of the active silicon region is essentially the same for all current detectors likely to show up in a digital camera, so it most comes down to pixel area. The more pixels, the smaller the pixel area. Sorry to keep coming back to that, but I think we've hit a point where we'll keep getting worse and worse cameras until consumers realize what's going on.



I think your last point really hits on some of the different appeal of the iPhone and Android. I used to work at a national lab where people's laptops were split roughly evenly between OS X and Linux. (A small minority had Windows laptops, nearly everyone had a Linux desktop that they did most of their cpu intensive work on.) Most of the people with macs had linux laptops in the past and got tired of having to fuss with the configuration any time it left their desk. Others didn't want to live with the limitations of OS X (no decent package manager, ports of only the most popular open source packages, the really annoying file system, etc.) and stuck with Linux even if it was a little more work. I see the appeal of Android as very similar to the appear of a linux laptop.

[Brianary]

No offense taken; you've said it quite well. Clearly we're synchronized on this. :)