Ok, disclaimer done, onto the analysis itself.
First Contender
Almost two years ago (that's April 2008), I acquired an iPhone, first generation, 16GB, through some friends in the US. The immediate experience I had with the phone was that of awe, while attending the WWW 2008 conference. Free wifi meant that over 50% of the time I was interacting with the Web and e-mail seamlessly, without having my laptop in, well..., my lap. My mobility during the entire conference had greatly changed. Heck, I even could make calls through wifi using Fring, with an exceptional sound quality and low ping - and I was behind the Great Firewall of China while at the conference. So far, so good.The main reasons that made me delve into the iPhone concern two things: the user experience that Apple craves for in all their products, and their immense applications catalogue App Store. For me, these two reasons have kept me a very very happy user for these two years. But here's a more detailed analysis of each one.
User Experience
For those who don't know me that well, I'm currently a researcher on the HCIM Lab. Therefore, I focus a lot of my work and attention to everything related with user experience (UX).First focus: hardware. My iPhone is currently two years old. In terms of longevity, that would make this phone almost a dinosaur. But it certainly doesn't feel like one. Of course, being the first gen iPhone, the speakers aren't that great. The lack of 3G (only GPRS used outside of wifi) does make me aware of the bloat of some (most?) Web sites - almost better than using YSlow :) The 16GB tend to fill up real quickly, since I have the bad habbit of listening to full discographies. It would also be nice to rely on real GPS, instead of the poorer grade A-GPS. Mind me, all of these issues have been solved in more recent versions of the iPhone.
So, even with all these limitations, I feel extremely happy with the phone, even after two years. I believe that this is due to a non-quantifiable property of the device itself (hardware+software): it's tangible. The way one holds the device and interacts with it just feels natural. And, for me (and a lot of people), that's more important. Not everything is about a buttload of features.
Second focus: software. The iPhone OS plays a crucial role on meeting users' expectations. It's stability allows for little room for failure (after all, it's a UNIX-ish operating system). The constant upgrades on the firmware provided a game-changing approach to mobile phones, where user experience is improved at each cycle: new features appear, old bugs are squashed, performance is improved, battery life is extended. This alone has extended the lifetime of the phone.
Another thing that the software plays a crucial role on the phone's tangibility concerns animations. Yes, animations can be (and often are) crappy, and deeply disturb the peace (i.e., experience) of all users, from novice to experts. But these animations play a significant role on the experience. Icons, buttons, pages, etc., all UI elements feel right, almost real, without laying at a UI-ish uncanny valley. The same factor applies to the soft keyboard. It's pure magic. It works way much better than what I would expect (and subsequent firmware upgrades have greatly improved its responsiveness), but the lack of a self-learning auto-completion dictionary is a very bad design choice.
Since I'm discussing a phone, ultimately I have to talk a bit about that part of the experience. Good address book, good phone interface (I just love its proximity sensor thingy), excellent SMS (that's texting for you americans) capabilities - esp. its conversational look, just like IM. One thing that I personally miss - and it does bother me a lot - is the lack of SMS sending status (i.e., delivered, pending, failed).
But there's more: bundled apps are great (read: the out-of-the-box experience is good from the ground start).
Using the Web with my fingers is, to say the least, an insightful experience. Mobile Safari nails it. Even in non-tailored Web pages, the "desktop"-ish Web becomes tangible, just like a (physical!!!) piece of paper. E.g., it became natural to me (read: part of my daily routine) to read the news while commuting in the subway. Furthermore, the ability of bookmarking Web sites to the phone's home screen is a win. With the ever growing (infinite?) tailoring of Web sites to the constraints imposed by the phone, several Web sites and Web applications are part of my home screen (esp. thanks to Google!). On a side note, not having Flash nor Java is a killer feature.
Being a descendant of the iPod, it's music playing abilities are also up to the expected. Tip: do not forget to turn off "shake to shuffle", otherwise music will skip while you're walking (bad default). Overall, the experience is as good as expected. However, while it's possible to listen to music while interacting with other apps (take that, you no-multitasking-pointing-fingerers!), I'd love to have the ability to scrobble my tracks directly to last.fm. Well, technically I'm doing that, but I had to jailbreak the phone first.
The maps application plays it role pretty well too. Even with A-GPS, it locates me accurately. Couple with Google's instructions on directions it has saved me a lot of time. Now I have zero excuses for getting lost somewhere.
Youtube. One of the holly grails of Internet-centric procrastination. Its barebones approach to the user interface provides a better UX compared to the Web version: straight-to-the-point controls, full-screen, and zero hormone-induced teenager-fuelled comments.
Using the Mail app, well, is less optimal than desired (it's crappy, really), to say the least. Having ported all my mail to Gmail, and having a complex mail configuration at my lab, the bundled Mail application acts funny, just like its desktop counterpart. Coupled with the inability of tagging Gmail messages, I ported my e-mail experience to Google's Gmail on the Web (optimised for smart phones) and it feels great. One less point to Apple for this, but half added to Mobile Safari. (Actually, this experience with desktop/mobile mail clients would provide enough fodder for an in-depth blog post. I hate them all with a passion.)
Finally, the camera. It's crappy and slow. Enough for twitting and facebooking, I say. Others believe that its limitations foster creativity.
App Store
Yes it's a walled garden. I think Apple should provide a semi-complex (but legal) way to install non-verified applications, to cater to their power users (are these users their main audience?).But having a walled garden like the App Store is often beneficial to users' experience with the device. Yes, users are dumb and often click (tap?) where they shouldn't and then, bam! their devices become part of botnets.
My phone is jailbroken and I only take advantage of the aforementioned last.fm scrobbling capability. I guess it says something about the urge of (not!) having a more open approach to the App Store.
Another thing that I believe the App Store pretty much hit the nail concerns their App acceptance policy. Despite being draconian sometimes, it imposes a quality level on the App's UX which is often just encountered in gaming consoles online stores. The App Store is well organised (despite suffering from some growing pains) and all applications provide a good explanation and screenshots to convey the experience they want to convey to their potential customers.
Despite all of this mumbo-jumbo, I have expanded and extended my experience with the phone with a motherload of Apps that I use on an almost daily basis. Games (e.g., Traffic Rush, Orba), utilities (e.g., AccuWeather, Cine SAPO, GuitarToolkit), social networking on steroids (e.g., Pond, Facebook, Foursquare), and news reading (e.g., Publico, New York Times), InstaPaper).
Overall, the "there's an app for that" moniker is really true. And overall, apps do provide a great user experience. Just look at some examples.
Second Contender
I had the pleasure to be given a Nexus One, the oft desired Android phone created by Google, touted as the iPhone killer. Due to my extensive usage with the iPhone, as you can tell from the excessive number of paragraphs above, I had to compare both devices.But first, an obvious remark: I have been using the Nexus for just 2 weeks now, which is close to 100x less time. This fact single-handedly undermines the comparison in a couple of things: the tangible metaphors provided by both systems differ, thus I often make some mistakes while interacting with the Nexus. These type of issues will not have a role for discussion on which is the best device. But the experience on using a tangible device for two years now, yes, that will have a role in the discussion. /endofdisclaimer Now, onto the analysis itself.
User Experience
Being a Google fan myself (Search, News, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader used recurrently on a daily basis), my expectations for this device were high. The first thing I noticed is the gorgeous, impressive, beautiful AMOLED screen. Putting this device side-by-side with the iPhone, the latter pales. A lot.The phone also feels very fast. Actually it feels a lot faster than my iPhone (not sure about its speed comparison with the 3GS, though). This single fact poses significant implications on the quality of the UX of the device. A faster CPU does imply the capability to improve the UX.
Another feature touted by iPhone killers concerns having a memory card slot. The Nexus accomplishes this with a standard microSD slot, with a bundled 4GB card. Less than the memory of the iPhone, but expandable to a theoretical 128GB. This will be great to carry my entire music library and still have some space left for pictures.
The Nexus' physical buttons provide a different UX to interact with the phone. One, which I call "the nipple" is similar to Blackberry's trackball. I loathe it and wished that HTC and Google's industrial designers hadn't had the chance to include it. It's too imprecise, feels like an afterthough, too little gripe. (tip: do NOT use it to "click".) But hey, I suppose they wanted to cater to Blackberry customers, providing a shorter path for conversion. Nevertheless, the trackball also acts as a LED, blinking when a notification appears. I like this a lot!
The other four buttons (back, menu, home, search) are touchable buttons, almost like software buttons, and provide physical feedback through vibration (loved this part). In time, I have quickly grasped their usage through the daily interaction with the phone. Different from the iPhone, not better nor worse. Regarding pure soft keys (i.e., touch keyboard), I'm not sure about its effectiveness while typing. The auto-completion is better than the iPhone's, but the smaller spacing between keys is a big no-no for my somewhat fat fingers.
Which brings me to the biggest gripe wrt to the touch screen. Yes, I can confirm it's less imprecise than the iPhone's, just like others have extensively previously tested. I have found one particular issue with this touch screen: it fails A LOT (and by that I mean almost always!) with moisturised hands... Impossible to type, to hit buttons, etc. Pretty unusable. Other than that, it's more than good (after all, it's capacitive).
Still on the hardware side, the Camera is absolutely better than my iPhone's. Faster, more responsive, with a better lens (do not care about megapixels, that's a crappy way to compare camera quality). Loving it. Multimedia-wise, this hardware analysis finishes with a heads up to the speakers: great quality coming out of these babies!
Now onto software.
By being based on the Linux Kernel (also UNIX-ish), the Android platform started great. Applications run inside a VM, Dalvik. Despite of this, I do not feel any sluggishness on running apps. By having it coupled with the leveraging of the Java platform for development, it's a winning recipe for success.
Going up a couple of layers in the OS, I reach the user interface. Most of the interaction metaphors feel natural, tangible. The inclusion of the "back" button in the phone provides to be useful especially when getting lost in seesmic-twitter-detail-link-Web page hyperspaces.
As a phone, it provides the same UX as the iPhone. Contacts, calling, and SMS, all function perfectly for my daily usage without any burden. And they provide me with SMS notifications. Yay! (Hear that, Apple?)
One of the things that have impressed me in the Nexus, and I already expected something like this, concerns its integration of Google services. You log-in into your user account and everything is setup and working: Mail, calendar, chat. Despite the fact that Gmail labels aren't coloured as they should (they're all blue!), Gmail is one killer app on Android. Almost as good as its mobile Web version.
Which brings me into the next topic: Web. They have exceeded their expectations. The Nexus is an awesome device to interact with the Web. The speedy CPU coupled the excellent V8 virtual machine provide a great experience, even with JS-heavy Web pages. Substantially better than in the iPhone. One particular aspect they have catered to more powerful users is the ability to hook features into the browser, such as providing support to InstaPaper. This is one of the cases where under-hooking the OS provides added values.
The same applies to listening to music: since the OS is more open to applications, last.fm scrobbling works seamlessly.
However, UX-wise, I feel that sometimes the Nexus is more akin to engineering than to experiencing. More is more, contrary to the "less is more" adagio. Things such as:
- "Stricter" animations (i.e., more stiff, less smooth, and more sluggish) kill some of the expected tangible properties.
- Several Yes/No confirmation dialogs, contrary to usability guidelines.
- Insensible defaults, such as leaving the chat open, even when you kill the Gtalk application. I had to figure out I had to logout of the chat for this to stop.
- Background apps is a neat feature, theoretically. However it drains too much battery, makes the system a bit more sluggish, and task management becomes a burden the user has to handle. I wished there was a toggle to make this more iPhone-ish...
- Did I mention it takes 9 freaking touches to kill an application? (Yes, this is a case where "there's an app for that" diminishes the issue, but doesn't solve it UX-wise).
- There's no way to disable Data communication. I just reached the limits of my pre-paid data plan real quickly thanks to this. (Yes, this is also a case where "there's an app for that" diminishes the issue, but doesn't solve it UX-wise).
Android Market
The first issue that arose concerns the availability of paid apps. Since I'm located in Portugal, Google says it's a no-no in this place. Oh, Google...This leaves open just a small breach of applications. Coupled with the less tight rules for publishing applications, the overall quality of the Android Market is less than optimal. The usual suspects are there (e.g., Facebook even comes pre-installed, seesmic, etc.). Unfortunately I have noticed that most of the applications have a lower quality (features, UX), when compared to their iPhone counterpart.
However, it leaves too much out. I mentioned previously that App Store's ability to cater to my expectations has a significant role on the tangibility of the device. It's not a phone, nor a Web browser. It's all of that and much more.
Final thoughts
(I'm pretty sure I have forgot to mention things about my experience with both phones. But probably that means that those things aren't that important for me...)Competition is great! Having a ground-breaking device such as the iPhone has put a lot (A LOT) of companies on their toes wrt Internet, Web, phone calling, game platforms, application developers, mobility, pervasiveness. Companies started touting their newer phones as iPhone killers, particularly by having more features (not by having a better UX - mind that).
Google also did that with the Nexus, but keeping a keen eye on the UX. Despite some of its awkwardnesses, I believe Google will further improve Android's UX, since they are strong advocates of Iterative Design techniques. Ultimately, I expect the Nexus to become par with the current state of the iPhone UX-wise.
But Apple will keep feeling the pressure of the Android platform, and will push forward the boundaries of tangible UX on smart phones. Unfortunately I am not so sure whether the Android Market will catch up with the App Store, both in quantity and quality terms. I predict that, if that doesn't happen, Google (and other contenders) will lose this war. Even if Apple doesn't get its head straight wrt its Web strategy.
I'm carrying both in my pocket, every day. I interact with both all the time (sometimes at the same time - no roll tongue intended). Let's see what the future will say for both devices and how that will change the experience I'm having.
