Sorry for the midleading title guys, this isn't going to be a flamewar of superiority.

a friend of mine let me play with his iphone at work today and contrary to my usual iTrashing, I actually enjoyed it. I currently have a Motorola Droid, rooted and the whole bit, but I am REALLY sick of the abysmal battery life I am getting from it. I alternate two batterys every day, and its just getting obnoxious.

I know in the last phone thread I said I would take crap battery life over an iPhone but I may stand corrected. We were playing pandora today for 2 1/2 hours and it only used 2% of his battery... which would drain mine in half. That pretty much sold me.

My problem is I LOVE Android, and all of its capabilities. I am not entirely familiar with the iPhones apps to know what it CAN do. I know a lot of what it CAN'T do, being a usual iphone hater.

I am looking for a few things that may be possible through iphone with apps that I am not aware of.. I will rely on those of you with iphones to help me out:
-Homescreens (this is a biggie) HTC style if possible. Maybe a launcher app?
-Facebook integration
-exploring and downloading files on my phone
-panoramic camera app
-Flash 10 (jailbroken if necessary)
-voice to text/voice commands
-google voice

Also some pros and cons to iOS over Android, or arguments for keeping android and holding out for a better model.

There are no launcher apps. Homescreen apps are mostly a misnomer, since they do not replace the homescreen at all. You get a list of icons, period.
Facebook is only integrated in menial ways, IIRC.
You cannot explore/download random files to your phone. There must be an app that takes them, and you cannot share files between apps at all. Download a file in the Dropbox app and want to edit it in Pages? Too bad, not possible.
There's panoramic apps for EVERY phone.
Flash 10 is only available using a nasty hack (and it's not stable), and yes, you must be jailbroken.
There are some voice commands, but they do not even remotely mirror the features provided by Google's.
I believe there is now a Google Voice app, but it does not integrate with the phone at all.
Also important to me is that it does not come with any free GPS navigation software, and Google Navigation does not exist on the iPhone at all.

Finally, the thing that would likely drive you most crazy: notifications. Essentially, iOS has no management for notifications. Got a new IM? Big popup window in your face. Got a new text message? Big popup window in your face. Got a calendar alert? Big popup window in your face. Etc. You can either have notifications on or off, there is no other way to manage them.

Also, what in the world are you doing with your phone to be going through two batteries a day? Even my EVO, which isn't known for battery life, can make it about 14 hours when I'm out and about. And only uses about 3% an hour on Pandora with the screen off.

I am a heavy data user, and usually run overclocked. If pandora took that little of my battery away that would be a dream come true.

From your list it sounds like I would not be too happy with an iPhone..

It sounds like you want a laptop and a car adapter.

...My hero has a 3 day battery life.
Probably because I don't overclock my phone.

Or maybe you just don't talk to anyone...

What the heck does "heavy data user" mean?

Unless you're sitting there downloading stuff ALL THE TIME there's no reason for it to be using that much. And stop overclocking and start undervolting.

This and the fact that you're probably killing the battery with such heavy use. My overclocked Pre seems to eat batteries every few months (possibly due to heat?)

Added some corrections to your suggestions.

iOS notifications are horrible. Android, WP7, and WebOS notifications all blow away iOS's system.

Why can I not use a smart phone heavily and expect at least average battery life?? That's not much to ask and certainly not as big of an issue as joncey is making it out to be. That's what they were meant for. If I wanted to just call and text I would have purchased an LG flip phone.

And cm, heavily means a few gigs a month of data use.

Allow me to correct your incorrect corrections:

1. Yes, they do exist on the App Store. Do they come with the iPhone? No. Also, free GPS software is generally much inferior to the Google Nav offering.
2. As I said, you can only turn notifications on or off. You didn't correct anything. The problem is, the way notifications are given is atrocious and annoying. You know your UI for a feature is broken when people often prefer to simply not use it. All other good smartphone OSes keep notifications out of the way so they do not interrupt what you're doing, and can be addressed as necessary.

A few gigs a month doesn't seem heavy at all. I'm playing with my Mesmerize constantly and I only recharge it at night. Maybe you don't take care of your battery.

A few GB is nothing. There is something wrong with your phone or the apps you are running. Check your battery usage and see what the highest users are. Also compare uptime to awake time, and make sure the phone is even getting to sleep mode.

Go invent a better battery. This kind of technology is really hard to make. It's not just the engineers being lazy.

That wasn't implied to developers, it was aimed at you and joncey for facepalming a legitimate request.

CM I just flashed another rom and the battery life has improved but its only day 1 so we'll see. All my apps use 2-10% depending on use. The highest users are the android system and the display. Which means everything is as it should be. I am beginning to think it is the phone though. I charge my battery out of necessity every night. Also, I use setcpu and profile my CPU frequency so I should be getting much better life. We'll see in the coming days.

Hey guys, I overclocked my desktop, and I noticed my electric bill increased slightly. Why can't I expect them to charge me the same that they did before?

Legitimate? x25064, you're overclocking a phone! Why would you even do this?? IMO the second you run a piece of equipment out of spec you lose the right to complain about it.

Even a small increase in clock rate can radically increase power consumption. It's not linear - more cycles = more heat = more impedance.

x25064: but did you check the awake time?

I mean, I can sort of understand why people might try overclocking a desktop CPU. Those are designed for a wider margin, and CPU manufacturing methods are reliable enough now that the CPU you bought can probably perform as well as a top-end chip unless you're unlucky.

Why would you even consider overclocking some crappy TI SoC?

Jon`C: why not? Other than complaining about battery life, there's no real reason not to. And you can get some significant overclocks on some of these chips, which dramatically affects speed. Hell, some Droids and Pre (same Cortex chips) can overclock to double their original rates.

I've seen G1 overclocks that put it above the droid for some CPU benchmarks. Pretty impressive considering the G1 handset that can be had for very cheap these days, and was released 1.5 years before the Droid.

You can tweak battery life with tools like SetCPU to only overclock on demand, and set up profiles to restrict or enable OC'ing based on battery life/power connection. Overclocking on my G1 yields much better performance for more recent 2.2 games/iOS ports like Doodle Jump and Fruit Ninja. G1 users have enjoyed a nice extended product life due to the flexibility of being able to overclock.

Let's not lose perspective here - we're talking about a 600 MHz ARM7. Yes you can overclock them by an impressive percentage, but I can't even begin to imagine what you're actually accomplishing by doing it. You're talking about doubling the speed of a machine that's designed to spend most of its time polling a priority queue.

Maybe it's just a failure of imagination, but if you care so much about CPU power you should be using a laptop - it's still a hundred times more powerful than an overclocked Droid and your battery's going to last longer too.

It doesn't need to stay overclocked 24/7. In fact, that would destroy battery life even if it WASN'T overclocked. Most smartphones use frequency scaling, bringing the minimum clockspeed when it's idle to like... 125mhz instead of the 2x overclock 1.2ghz. And then whenever it's needed, just like on a PC, it scales up. Except it has a far higher ceiling than before.



Phones are starting to catch up though. They're not unusably slow anymore. Hell, the Motorola Atrix phone has a webtop environment that can run desktop-level Firefox. No, it's not the fastest thing out there, but it's getting there quick.

I more or less have to overclock my Pre to make it usable (it's only overclocked when the screen is on) because it's so damn slow. I have to wait seconds for menus to come up otherwise.

Does the overclock affect the memory bus? Is it a multiplier or does it just raise the ceiling? I don't enough enough about Droid CPU scaling or the overclock to say anything for sure, but I'm pretty sure x-whatever is complaining about a problem he created.

To be honest, I have no idea how the overclock is actually implemented. I don't think it's a matter of raising the multiplier, since the frequency steps are still exactly the same if overclocked.

Also, I don't think even something like the insane overclocks I was describing has affected battery life TOO much, simply because of the fact that it doesn't run at that clock speed 24/7. Even when you're using the phone a bit it doesn't often reach that high.

It's mostly useful for browsers, gaming, etc.

We can end all tech superiority rants now.

I have ALWAYS had bad battery life ever since I purchased the phone. The main reason why I had said in my last post that I think it is the actual hardware itself.

As others have stated, android 2.2 works much better when running at 1 ghz. Roms and scaling apps further enhance this. I receive BETTER battery life while being overclocked and rooted then I did stock out of the box.

the Ti processor is underclocked stock. Its common knowledge within the droid community, that is why so many people overclock it. Anything past 1 ghz is pushing the cpu past its limits and ultimately pointless. You are making a mountain out of a molehill. I respect your knowledge but really, your overexaggerating things here.

All I am saying is my particular Android device, no matter what I do to it, has terrible battery life.

While battery life is dependent on the OS, hardware plays into it a lot too. It's not hard to get an Android phone that does better than an iPhone for battery life. eg. my vibrant will do two days + easy. with a decent amount of usage. Just because your old overclocked phone gets bad battery life doesn't mean all android phones do.

There is an app called 'downloads' which allows you do download any file off the internet and then either open them (if possible, DL supports some minor formats) or transfer them to your computer. It also has a mp3 player too.

Yes, the issue is opening them. iPhone has no sense of file associations, or intents as Android more generally calls it. If you wanted to, say, get a file off of Dropbox and edit it in Pages, Pages would need to have Dropbox support in it (Which naturally it never will). In Android, it's as simple as saying "Open With" and picking whatever apps report they're able to open the file.

I have a Motorola Droid and if I perform even a slight CPU intensive task the damn phone gets HOT. Like I can feel residual heat in pocket. I used to be able to hold a charge but it's quickly diminishing to where if I leave it uncharged for a day, it will go dead and it's moderate usage.

I did the whole overclocking, rooting the phone, and installing some hacked up Android OS bit but after several iterations of unstable OSs and more complicated rooting techniques, I decided to hell with all of it and I run 100% stock Android unrooted. And you know what, it's not bad. After I got all the nerdiness out, I went back to being practical.

edit: iOS vs. Android: After having used both in the form of an iPod touch and Motorola Droid I have to say Android OS wins in both UI and development. I do like Android's notification bar. It tells me ALL notifications and I can selectively choose which I can view or ignore. To get rid of the red numbers I have to open whatever app is installed to view notification(s). From development side, Java >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Objective-C and Java is ****. HOWEVER, I will say that I'm hearing that MonoTouch is making great strides. But, to do any kind of iOS development I must do this on a Apple computer. I canNOT develop iOS applications on Windows or Linux. If I want to start iOS development I have to drop $1,500 on a MacBook. But, why iOS is kicking ass is that Steve Jobs is a cold, shrewd, mother****er. He realizes not like Google at first is that the world is not technology savvy in the slightest. In fact, people are still a bunch of ****ing idiots. So Apple made their to UI completely draw on the "oooooooh shiny" aspect. And it has made Apple's shareholders millionares overnight. So there you have it. Android is functional, iOS is shiny

What the hell, dalf. Don't purposefully avoid the censor.

FREE SPEECH MANG!

Problem with developing for Android: Java is an awful language and Eclipse is a terrible buggy, slow, unreliable pile of trash

Problem with developing for iOS: Objective-C is a joke of a language and Xcode has three features

Sucks because Eclipse used to be pretty bamf.

NetBeans used to suck but now it's the Visual Studio of the Java community.

Well, maybe that's IntelliJ, but that's not free.

Problem with developing for WP7: hahahahahahahahahahahaha

I haven't used it yet, what's bad about it?

Other than just being pretty limited at the moment, it's basically just SL3 in VS2010 and Blend 4.