austinpreneur

iPhone vs. G1 - Forget the Internet, which is a better phone?

Lets start off simply. What's it like to make a phone call on an Android G1 phone versus an Apple iPhone? I show the screenshots of exactly what you would see and then talk a bit about my experience with the headset, microphone, and speakerphone quality. Finally, I hit on the carrier issue - because you're not just choosing a phone - you're married to either T-Mobile or AT&T as well.

Both phones have similar interfaces for the basic functions of dialing a phone number by the digits or by selecting one of your existing contacts. Making a phone call is pretty much the same. 

Android G1

 

Apple iPhone

   

(I redacted some phone numbers and email addresses)

 

Headset & Microphone

Both have loud, clear headsets that can easily be heard. Both have good microphones and everyone else can hear you. they work great as phones. The iPhone is about half as thin and lighter so I find it a bit nicer to hold, but that's a minor issue and a personal preference.

Speakerphone

Both have a speakerphone built-in, but neither would take the place of that Polycom at your office. Both are comparable, although the speaker on the G1 is a bit louder and the microphone on the iPhone seems to be a bit clearer. I remember my old Nextel had an excellent speakerphone so I would use it all the time. I don't find myself using it on these phones very much because the overall quality is just too low.

T-Mobile vs. AT&T

This is probably a bit of a religious issue. I mean, its not like any phone companies are actually GOOD are they? I have hated every phone company I've ever worked with (AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile). I have yet to try Virgin Mobile but I have high hopes that they could be different like the other Virgin brands.

It's hard to go wrong with AT&T. It is the original phone company after all. Coverage is really good and the 3G network is fast. There are stores everywhere. They work internationally. Even better, most of the time you don't have to deal with AT&T, you just deal directly with Apple. 

BONUS! Dealing with Apple is a billion times better than dealing with a phone company. For those of you who aren't familiar, Apple is "genius" at customer service. You can schedule an in-store appointment at their "Genius Bar" from the web for the same day. Instead of hiding it in the back of the store, it's right in the middle where everyone can see it. The Apple techs are super helpful and if there is a problem, they will often just hand you a new phone. If you do need to ship something off, its fast.

T-Mobile has most of the same benefits of AT&T. Good coverage, lots of stores, international coverage. I'm not sure if their network is as fast - I'll do a separate post comparing the speed of the two. 

The big thing they are missing is Apple - Google search is no replacement for Apple customer service. I'm sure that over time the community resources around the G1 will grow into something much better than today. However, I don't think it will ever match the Apple experience.

Conclusion

All other things being pretty equal, having Apple for customer service is the most significant factor in making me say that the iPhone is a better PHONE than the Android G1. I also like that its thinner and fits in my pocket better. So if you got rid of all the other functionality and all these could do is make phone calls, I'd go with an iPhone.

Google G1 versus Apple iPhone

I definitely would qualify as an early adopter. I bought the original iPhone on the day it came out, and then the iPhone G3 on the day it came out. I tried to order the Google G-1 phone on the day it came out but had problems ordering from the T-Mobile website and took me until early November to get around to picking one up.

I'm so torn. I love Apple and I love Google. How's a geek to choose?

I've decided to put them head-to-head. I'm carrying both around and I have my GrandCentral account set up to ring both of them at the same time, allowing me to easily switch from one to the other. Too bad neither of them will let me listen to my GrandCentral voicemail messages...

I was trying to write up one master review and after more than a month I've decided to release it in smaller chunks (so that it actually gets released). Each blog post will focus on a particular aspect, such as making calls, taking a photo, download speed, or typing.

In addition to the normal tags, everything in this thread will be tagged "iPhone vs G1".

Speed tip if you use Gmail over IMAP

If you use Gmail over IMAP, then you want to know about a new feature Google just released as part of Gmail Labs. It lets you make the "All Mail" folder invisible to IMAP so that your email client doesn't try to download every message twice.

Gmail is different from other IMAP implementations in that each "folder" corresponds to a Gmail "label". Because each message can have more than label in Gmail, each message can appear in more than one folder in IMAP. Gmail also has an "All Mail" view that shows all of the messages at once - the Inbox, Sent, Archived, Labels, etc. This is handy when you're in Gmail and want to search across everything, but its not really needed in an IMAP client because most IMAP clients do their own indexing of messages and make it easy to search across all of them without having them in a folder.

The problem with the All Mail folder over IMAP is that it means you're downloading every message twice. And because your IMAP client thinks that a message that appears in 2 different folders is actually 2 different messages, any local searches that you do will return 2 results for every message - once in the folder you expect and once in the All Mail folder.

I have a lot of email - its measured in gigabytes - and so keeping around 2 copies of every messages is a pretty big deal. It takes up a lot of disk space, slows down my Internet because its downloading 2x as much, slows down my computer because my email program needs more memory to run. I highly recommend you turn off your All Mail folder!

To do this, go to Settings -> Labs and then turn on the Advanced IMAP feature. Next go to Settings -> Labels and uncheck All Mail. It's that simple!

p.s. hat tip to Ian Ragsdale for pointing this out to me after I complained about it screwing up my IMAP client!

Great explanation of Web 3.0

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, gives a great 2 minute explanation of Web 3.0. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com also has a decent article in TechCrunchIT. I'm a believer!

I got my invitation to try Google App Engine!

Well, I finally received my invitation to try Google App Engine.

If only I knew Python!

Your documents are currently unavailable

Today I logged into Google Docs to print out a spreadsheet I needed to view on my flight to San Francisco today. After bringing up the page, I saw a red box at the top of the page with text that went something like, "Your documents are currently unavailable."

My heart throbbed in an instant of panic. I switched to a different computer and tried the same page and it worked fine. I went back to the original computer to take a screen shot but when I turned back the error message was gone and the page was loaded successfully.

Phew.

(it happened again and I caught a screen shot)

"Get out of my way you stupid programmers!" says the CFO

I'm playing around with Google Spreadsheets as a platform for backend application reporting and its quite promising so far. They key to it are special functions that you can use in a spreadsheet cell to import data from XML, CSV, RSS or even a well formatted web page with HTML tables or lists.


=importXML("URL","query")
=importData("URL")
=ImportHtml(URL, "list" | "table", index)
=ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems])


Full documentation is here.

From what I can tell, every time you open the spreadsheet it reloads all the files. It does not seem to update the spreadsheet real-time with new data as you are editing it - but I think that's probably for the best.

Lets face it, most of the important data from our website activity and logs ends up in a spreadsheet at some point. The data is needed by the CFO for reconciling expenses, recording business metrics and generating future projections. Operations needs to monitor the health of the system.

In many companies, however, these requests are fulfilled by separate database admins and programmers because the CFO is not empowered to get the data himself. There is lots of, "I'm waiting to get that data back from the Reporting department." Not only does this slow things down, but causes the CFO and other decision makers to ask fewer questions. Asking fewer questions is bad! Being able to easily ask lots of questions is very good!

When something is fast and easy, you can try 10 different combinations and see what's best. When something is slow and painful, you try your best to get it right the first time. The first method seems to produce better results in my experience. It's usually better to iterate rapidly and allow for failures in the process than to try and get it perfect.

This is very similar to how email marketing tools evolved. In the beginning, the programmers for your application or website also wrote the content for the email messages it would send. Over time, the marketers took over control of the content. But then every time they wanted to change the content, they needed to go ask the programmers. While there are many other reasons to use an Email Service Provider (ESP), I believe this was actually one of the most compelling reasons at first.

So what I'm doing to start is creating a data feed of user activity. It's a daily snapshot that shows the total number of users, number of pageviews, advertising inventory generated, etc. This automatically becomes a spreadsheet in Google with a row for each day. Now the CFO can do whatever he wants with it from within the spreadsheet. Every once in a while he may have to ask the programmers to add a new column or data point to the data feed, but he doesn't have to go through someone else to get at the data and manipulate it.

Ideally, you would just dump all the raw data and logs into the spreadsheet. I haven't tested this to see how much data they will take, but I just assumed that wouldn't work. But the more granular you can get, the more the CFO can work independently without depending on others to program new reports. Rather than using a PHP or ROR charting package, you just use the spreadsheet. It's much faster and easier. You can make 2 different spreadsheets with the same data feeding into them to compare different theories.

I'm still just getting started with this and will post more examples and real-world usage data soon. If you try this out, I'd like to hear about your experiences.

Startup on Google

I've helped a number of startups and non-profits to get up and running on Google for their email, calendar and document collaboration and have been pleased with the results. And so far, I haven't found any need to upgrade from the free Standard Edition to the Premier Edition with a yearly fee (although I'm sure that there are many situations where it is appropriate).

Because everything is "open", it's safe to try out Google without having to worry about being "locked in". You can switch to another solution at any time without losing any data.

What do you get?

POP/IMAP/Webmail email accounts with plenty of storage space

A full-featured calendar that works over the web or syncs with Windows Outlook and Mac iCal

Web-based equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint

Secure instant messaging, internet phone and videoconference

Simple website tools and hosting

Everything is secure and encrypted

It's all a-la-carte so you can pick which pieces you want to use. I recommend most organizations start by moving over their email accounts first and then start using the shared calendar and documents. The rest of the services can be added as/if needed.

What does it cost?
Nothing!

That's right, it's free! It is one of the most reliable email services and also has more features than just about anyone else. All things considered, it is clearly the best value and arguably the best at any cost.

I really find it hard to imagine why anyone would pay for a slow, unreliable email service from their ISP when they could have a best-of-breed solution for free. If you really want to have someone to call for support (even though you'll probably never need it), you can pay $50 per user per year for the Premier Edition.

To start using Google, you first go to their site and create an account for your domain. You probably have an existing domain name that you want to use. Creating the account at Google doesn't do anything to change your current domain, so you can go ahead and sign up without worrying about screwing anything up.

You can also switch over your email for just a few accounts without doing everything at once - a great way to test it out and get comfortable with it.