OK after many years of Blackberry and then iPhones I have decided to get a S5 when my contract expires on October 2nd. I have messed with my sons S5 and my wifes new iPhone 6 and since I had them side by side I decided to switch to the S5.
I just did the same thing. I looked at the iPhone 6 and decided you know what? I'm tired of Apple being 2-3 years behind. Also, Android is better able to handle large screens by having a dedicated Menu and Back buttons at the bottom.
Some things i've learned:
- Some apps do not have a menu/settings icon at the top. You must long-press the Menu button to get this to appear.
- Notifications are not as well-integrated as iOS. Specifically, you'll need to find some kind of lockscreen app or widget if you want to see notification text on your lock screen. There is a setting in the Messaging app to "Show message text on lock screen" as otherwise it just says "2 Messages waiting" or some such. But stuff like Gmail will NOT show message text/preview on the lock screen which is annoying to me. There was a great widget for this, but they rewrote it and the new version is junk so I'm waiting for someone else to produce an awesome lock screen app. But since the new Android L OS will be adding it's own lock screen notification "previews", maybe I will just wait.
- On the Samsung S5, double-tapping the Home button brings up voice control. To bring up your list of running apps, click and hold the Menu button in the lower left corner.
- Android stores all your apps in theApp Drawer. You must choose which of those apps appear on your multi-page home screen (just like the iPhone). The idea is to customize what apps you actually use, and then if you need to access your full app list, that's in the App Drawer. When you delete an app from a home screen, it does not delete it from the phone.
- Android lets you pick which apps do different things, like a PDF app, a Maps app, an E-mail app. This is something people on iPhone have been begging for for years and finally got with iOS 8. Another customization is the ability to switch keyboards. The Samsung keyboard (and its accursed autocorrect) is absolute rubbish. The Google one is better, but your best bet is to get Swype. It's strange to get used to, but basically you draw a line from key to key to complete the word. It's frighteningly accurate and once you get good at it, you will type far far faster than you ever did on the iPhone.
- Most Android apps have not yet adopted the idea of swiping left to go back, most notably Google Chrome (which is the best Android browser). You'll be making copious use of the dedicated Back button at the lower right corner of the phone until then.
- Just like any phone, too many running apps can really drain the battery. When Apple came out with multitasking on their iPhones, they locked down what the background apps could do in a very strict way so that apps could not kill the battery. Android is a bit more wild west in this regard and a single app can suck down the battery in just a matter of hours. I use a program called All-in-One Toolbox which has a "Boost" mode. It kills (ends task) on all those background apps to save your battery life.
Circa58 said:
So I have questions;
1. I have 6500 songs on my iPhone, how do I manage these without iTunes, or can I use iTunes? I understand I can import the songs from iTunes but how do you manage them? I don't like the Google Music app, I would like something similar to iTunes for ease of use. I will buy the 128gb Sandisk so I can expand and keep all of my songs in one spot
I always found iTunes to be a kafkesque nightmare designed to force you to BUY songs rather than download mp3s. I am thrilled that I will be able to manage music myself. That said, there are a number of music library PC apps that will manage your music for you.
I guess another important thing I did not realize was inherent in the software design, a backup like the cloud is always a good idea. I will certainly do this first
Not only is using iCloud on the iPhone a no brainer as an iPhone user, but when you get your Samsung Galaxy S5, the first app you want to run is "
Samsung Smart Switch". You give it your
iCloud login and password and it downloads all your contacts, text message (SMS) history, music, photos, notes, e-mail settings, and even grabs a list of all the apps you had on your iPhone. This process will take 4-6 hours but when you're done, all your contacts, text messages, photos, and music will have moved over. Then it will run down the list of apps and try to find equivalents on the Play Store.
It's a totally painless process. My only complaint is that Notes were jumbled, but if you have your iPhone set to sync Notes with your Gmail account, then you can just e-mail them to yourself one-at-a-time by logging into Gmail and typing "in:notes" in the top field.
Overall I love the Samsung and Android after 1 week of use. I don't miss the pitiful battery life of iPhone or locked down customziation. I don't miss iTunes. If you have any more questions feel free to ask!
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Another thing I forgot to mention...
On iPhone, I believe you have two choices of text-to-speech for the built-in apps (Male and Female) and one choice on Google Maps (Google's default high-rez woman's voice it comes with).
When I first tried out Google Maps on the Samsung S5, I was shocked at the atrociously bad sound quality on the voice. She sounds like a 2-pack a day smoker speaking from the bottom of a well.
Go to
Settings ->
Language and input ->
Text-to-speech Options.
There are two choices there, the
Samsung and the
Google. Once you pick one, click the
Gear icon next to the voice, choose
Install voice data, choose your
Language. The basic quality Google female voice is 8MB and already installed. You have the option of downloading the high quality female voice which adds another ~200MB.
I'm now looking at the Play Store at other TTS options, trying to find a decent male voice. I wish they'd add a category for TTS rather than it being mixed in with dictation software and other junk. Ivona seems to have good voices, but sadly the only realistic male voice is of a boy. I think it would raise some eyebrows if the voice coming out of my phone is a little kid.
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I find the Android notification sounds for Messaging and Alarms to be pretty indistinct and not ear-catching.
Fortunately you can get a ZIP file here of all the iOS7 sounds:
How to Get iPhone Ringtones, Notifications, & System Sounds on Your Nexus 5 ? Nexus 5
then follow the instructions here:
Android 101: Adding your own custom sounds to Android events | Android Central
Connect your phone to your PC, create a "Notifications" and "Ringtones" folder and drag-and-drop the ogg music files in there. You can safely ignore the complex instructions of putting your phone into Recovery mode and all that. Just create folders and drag-and-drop. You should also rename the sound files as the names are rather generic.
it's all about what preference is ... I used and use both lol
pretty cool and their own music ETC wouldn't shock me if Samsung went off on their own. Looks like that's their plan... We will have HTC sense Samsung touchwiz vanilla plain old android love the MOto X and HTC sense a LOT!
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