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Back when I started consulting I wanted to get a smartphone. Up until this point I had purposely chosen a feature phone, aka a dumb phone. I wanted something cheap that I could toss into my backpack while riding, and not worry too much if I fell. I felt that a consultant needed to be more connected, and face it, I love gadgets so it was time to step up and get something new.

Google had come out with the Google Nexus One phone. It had the latest Android OS without any manufacturer customizations. The goal of the Nexus line of phones is to have the pure Android experience and to always get the latest updates as soon as they are released. No extra apps, no extra UI junk. Noble.

I got the Nexus One, and used it for about a year and half. I love the Android OS. I like the features and functionality in the OS, and for a phone, the apps that are available are great. The customization that can be accomplished on Android are excellent too. I like that I can swap out core functionality on the phone.

A few months ago I bought an iPhone 4. There are lots of articles about how beautiful iOS is, and how much better than Android iOS is. I wanted to try the other big smartphone OS and see how it compared to Android.

This post is about which OS I prefer and why. It shouldn't have to be stated, but these are my opinions based on my usage of both phones. I an not an average computer/phone consumer, so my opinions may not be applicable to you or anyone else for that matter. A little background info on me. I use Windows, and had started using Google services long before I had my Nexus One. I am a developer, like to customize my computer environment, and I like to tinker. I also owned an iPad before I owned the iPhone.

Once I had the iPhone setup to integrate with my Google accounts I was ready to go. This setup wasn't easy though, and the iPhone never quite got my calendar synching to work smoothly. This was a royal pain as sometimes calendars wouldn't load, sometimes I couldn't add events to a calendar, and sometimes I couldn't modify an event. I never took the time to track down this issue, so I don't know what caused it. Once I got over this hurdle though, iOS was fine to use as a phone. There were lots of apps, including most of the ones I used on Android. There were loads more games for the iPhone than the Nexus, but I found that with the iPad, I used my phone less and less for consumption and entertainment.

One Android app that I really missed was My Tracks. This app was perfect for what I wanted, and I never found an iOS replacement that came close to its functionality.

In iOS there seemed to be two places that apps could have their settings. In the app, or in the system settings. There was no rhyme nor reason as to which app would have its settings where. I did find it a pain to be in an app, then have to leave it to modify settings for the app.

I don't like how iOS constrains icon placement on the home screens. Every app has to be on a homescreen exactly once, and there can't be any gaps in the placement of icons. Android has a bucket where all apps can be launched from. On each home screen the user can create a shortcut to an app. Users can also arrange icons on the homescreens any way they see fit and can leave gaps. This means that I can put my favorite or most used apps along the bottom row within easy reach. Another thing about homescreens is that in Android 2.3, the version on the Nexus, double tapping the home button displayed a small version of all my homescreens. This makes navigating to a specific screen much easier than on iOS where you have to swipe to find the one you want.

Speaking of home button, it bugs me that the home button on iDevices has so many uses. Tapping the home button from a homescreen takes you to the first home screen, unless you are already on the first homescreen. In that case you are taken to the search screen. Quickly double tapping brings up the list of recent apps. Long tapping the home button on the iPhone brings up the voice control. Android has similar functionality with the home button, but for some reason, my brain doesn't have as hard a time when mapping what I want to do to making my fingers do it. On Android, pressing the home button takes you to the home screen. Double tapping shows you your homescreens. There is no long press, and on the primary home screen, pressing the home button doesn't do anything. This works better for me.

As soon as I started using the iPhone keyboard, I realized that I definitely preferred the Android keyboard layout. That may be because I started off using Android and it may just be a familiarity thing. iOS wins on simple typing though. Apple nailed the letter prediction, and Google could do better there. Autocorrect is another thing that I think Android wins on though. When the Android autocorrect kicks in, there is a box with a number of possibilities. The user can select from the list. iOS pops up a box that has an x on it, and that looks like it should be something to choose. Instead, if you tap that box, the autocorrect is cancelled. I keep making the same mistake over and over with iOS autocorrect.

In iOS 5 Apple did a major overhaul of their notifications. I got the iPhone soon after iOS 5 was released, so I was never that frustrated by the old style notifications. Coming from Android though, I feel Apple has a long way to go in this area. In iOS the notifications are hidden unless you swipe the tray open. In Android the notification icons stay visible along the top edge of the screen, meaning I can switch on my phone, see if there is new email/tweets/whatever without having to touch the screen on my phone. Android also has proper background apps. I know that this can lead to battery drain, but there are some benefits to this. Couple this with the better notification system and I have a winner. Here are two examples: imap email accounts, and twitter clients. On my android phone these can run in the background, download new data, then set a notification. When I next check my phone I can immediately see if there is something I should read. This just fits better with how I work. On the iPhone, since there aren't really any background apps other than system apps, the only way imap email is downloaded is if I run the mail app. Same for tweets, I have to start up my twitter client and wait for things to get downloaded.

Speaking of the mail app on iOS. That is a horrible app. When I delete an email I could never figure out if the next message was going to get opened, or the previous message. The mail app integration with gmail left lots to be desired. I would delete an email, and it would not end up in the trash in gmail. There was no easy way to archive an email either. I would often have to leave a bunch of email in my inbox so that I could properly file them the next time I was at a computer.

Another stellar Android feature is the ability for apps to share data. iOS 5 included twitter integration. Oooh, this meant that a few places in the system you could use content to form a tweet. In Android an app can register to receive certain kinds of data eg text, images, etc. In an app the user can choose the Share option which pops open a list of apps to receive that data. In iOS it seems like every app has to implement its own version of sharing. This means that sometimes I can't share to the service I want. Another benefit to the Android way is that each app collects my username and password. The ability to share doesn't require this. On iOS it seems that I had to enter my passwords a lot more to enable the sharing abilities.

I find text selection in iOS a pain to work with. I find that my finger obscures the text that I am trying to select, and the magnifying glass that is presented doesn't help me that much. I also dislike how the text inside the magnifying glass looks blurry. Once a word is selected, I find the controls to expand and contract the selection to be too small to accurately grab and manipulate. Android has bigger controls that hang down below the text more. I find these controls far easier to work with. However, all is not perfect in Android land. The ability to select text in Android isn't universal, and sometimes to activate the text selection, you have to use a menu option. Clearly this sucks.

Unless you jailbreak your iPhone, iOS does not support widgets. Like I said, I am a tweaker and a tinkerer. Widgets offer some nice functionality (like system settings), and can offer a simple, easy way to get the state of something (a unread item count in google reader for example). I like widgets, and you can't have them in iOS.

I've heard so many times that it is the small details that matter. This is quite often spoken when talking about iOS. One of my bigger frustrations with iOS happened every single time I plugged in my phone to play music while the phone was connected to a Bluetooth hands free device. My truck has an input that plugs into the headphone jack, but if the phone was connected to the hands free device, the music would start playing out the hands free device, and not the headphone jack. Changing this was a pain. Suppose I remembered to do all this before I left the driveway. If I got a call the music would pause if I answered it. When I resumed the music, it would play out the hands free device. Not ideal. My Nexus One never had this problem, and the music would play out the expected device.

Another grievance with iOS is the incall controls. Supposed I call my voicemail account to delete some messages. I prefer to do this hands free, but in iOS selecting speaker phone, and getting it to show the dial pad is a multi step process. In Android, as part of the call control buttons, there is one to switch to speaker phone, and one to show the dial pad.

Stability must be mentioned. My Android phone rebooted on my a few times. When I saw this happen to the iPhone, I was shocked. I had expected it to be more stable than that. Apps on iOS crashed just as frequently as they did on Android. One iOS feature that is pretty cool is when you restart your device, when the device returns, all your apps are in the state you left them in.

Final notes. After using the iPhone for a while I decided have to sell it. To replace it, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This new phone has Android 4 on it, which is a nice upgrade from 2.3. Many of the quirks and anomalies from 2.3 have been addressed. I certainly don't hate the iPhone, it was decent enough and I can see why so many of them have been sold. For me though, Android works better. I'm also glad I took the time to try both OS'es.

The other day on ThinkGeek I saw they had something called a Mimo Mini. This is a small gadget, totally USB powered, and highly geeky (I think). This gadget is a USB powered mini monitor. At 7 inches diagonally, it adds a bit more screen real estate.

On a whim I decided to buy one. After making the purchase, and waiting for my delivery, I got it set up.

Setup is extremely easy. Run the installer, click OK a couple times, plug in the monitor, and that is it. There are some tweaks you can do to arrange where WinXP thinks it sits, but other than that, you can start using it right away.

On my main monitor I used to run a Rainmeter system display. I also had to run a small utility to block windows from maximizing over it. I re-arranged my Rainmeter skin to fit on the Mini, and now I can maximize on my main monitor again.

I also run the Task Mangler on there too. This allows me to keeps tabs on what is eating up the most amount of RAM (usually this is Visual Studio, or SQL Developer). I am also keeping the minimal version of iTunes there too.

TechNewsWorld has a review ( warning: advert splash screen ), where they suggest a few other interesting usages. Twitter client, photoshop palette holder, Yahoo Widget holder, are all good ideas.

I've had the Mimo Mini for less than a week, but already I am loving it. I keep it in landscape mode, but it can also be swiveled to portrait mode.

I'd read about dropbox a while ago and didn't think too much of it. There are getting to be more and more services that will allow you to use their disk space, and synchronize it to all the computers you specify. Dropbox didn't seem to offer as much as Windows Live Mesh but I gave it a shot anyway.

My first reaction was that the Dropbox synch was way faster than Mesh. Dropbox also keeps a history of what has happened, and shows you what is happening at any given time. Mesh does not. In fact, the only thing Mesh can give you is remote desktop access to any other computer in your mesh, which is interesting and helpful.

I was getting ready to uninstall both Mesh and Dropbox, then I read Joel's post on password management. I've been using my thumbdrive and a portable version of Keepass to store my passwords. As Joel suggested, I could keep my password file in my dropbox and use the installed version of Keepass. This way I add a new password, and I can access it from home too.

I then took things a step further and copied the Keepass exe to my dropbox. Now I don't need to install anything except the dropbox program and I have instant access to all my password from all my computers. Very cool. I essentially turned my 2 GB dopbox space into a 2GB thumbdrive that I don't have to carry with me.

A while ago while I was in Langley recently I visited Future Shop and found they had the Logitech MX Revolution mouse on sale for $80. I picked one up because I am looking for a good mouse for work, and this one seemed like it would be a good fit for my hand, and for my penchant for customizing my computing experience.

The scroll wheel is a great idea in that it had two modes, quick scroll, and normal click scroll. There is also a thumb rocker switch that can be customized for use.

From all descriptions I had read it sounded pretty customizable. Perfect.

Out of the box the mouse is pretty comfortable, and glides nicely across the desktop. I installed the software from the included disc, and immediately noticed some peculiarities with it.

The thumb rocker switch had only one setting for use, and not one for flipping up versus flipping down. That switch could only ever do one thing regardless of which direction you move it.

I also found the software didn't always remember its settings. I would change the configuration click save, exit the configuration software and discover the changes hadn't been applied. Opening the software again I would inevitably find the changes I made hadn't been saved.

The clicking scrolling wheel was too pronounced and I could feel the clicks reverberate through my finger. It didn't bother me for the first few days, but it soon got annoying and distracting. I even found that this clicking bothered my finger so I had to turn it off.

The scroll wheel had a feature where it will switch from clicking to free wheel. The configuration software allows you to determine how much force was needed to indicate when to switch over. What happens internally is when the wheel spins fast enough the clicking mechanism is moved away from the wheel and it spins freely. Unfortunately this switching to smooth scrolling is very finicky. I tried all sorts of setting to find the sweet spot, but I never got it dialed in so I had to disable it, and just let it live in free spin mode.

When the free spin comes to an end, the mouse automatically switches back to click mode. I could physically feel the wheel click into spot. This quite often causes the active application to scroll a couple lines one way or another. Imagine this scenario happening 20-30 times a day. You flick the scroll wheel, it changes to free spin mode, and when you get to the right place in the file you stop the spinning. Then the screen you are looking at jumps up or down a few lines after a slight pause. Dam annoying.

Another option was to click the scroll wheel to get it to change from click mode to free spin mode. It seems like a good idea but in my experience it was an odd feeling that I couldn't shake no matter how many times I tried it.

In the end I configured the mouse to always be in free spin mode for the three reason mentioned above (clicking bothering my finger, finicky switch to free spin, and the jumpy screen when coming out of free spin mode).

The worst thing that I experience with this mouse was that quite often I couldn't scroll down when Visual Studio 2005 was the active application. I could scroll up just fine, but scrolling down would often fail. This only happened in Visual Studio, and only happened when trying to scroll down. A product killer if most of your day is spent in this application.

Battery life seemed very good. I could work a whole week and by Friday afternoon the batter warning was starting to blink. The batteries aren't user replaceable though. How long they will last is a question that is on my mind.

This mouse features quite an ergonomic design, and at first it seemed comfortable. Too soon though I found I was getting a claw hand. You know, my hand would cramp up after using the mouse for a few hours, and when I let go of the mouse, my hand is stuck in the claw shape? Not good. I also found that using this mouse inflamed my tendinitis, so I would have to abandon it for a few days to rest my hand. Whats the point of using this mouse if I can't use it all the time?

One thing about this mouse that I loved was the thumb rest, but I wished there was something similar for my pinky and ring fingers..

I've since stopped using the mouse and switched back to a basic Dell supplied cheap mouse. It fits my hand much better. The Revolution was just a tad too small and that is what caused my claw hand and discomfort. Soon I am going to sell it to try and recoup some of the cost. Good sounding mouse, but just not right for me.