Samsung Mob!lers – Android vs RIM (Mission 1)

So, my first Samsung Mob!lers mission… For those of you that don’t know about Samsung Mob!lers, you can get all the info by heading over to the Mob!lers page via the navigation above!

For our first mission we were tasked with comparing Android to RIM. What are the phones like, how do they compare, what the best features are etc. Lets get straight into a comparison then! (I had originally tried the whole video thing! Spent a good few days playing around with the video, then decided i hated it.. So, i shall try a video for my next mission!)

Android vs RIM

To compare the two systems i need two phones! A blackberry device (RIM) and an Android device. Being part of the Mob!lers program has its perks, for this mission we were supplied with a gorgeous Samsung Galaxy Pro which runs the Android OS. Prior to having this phone I’ve been using the Blackberry Bold 9780! The Galaxy Pro has taken over as my main phone now with the Blackberry being demoted to a work phone.

In the interest of being fair, i cant really compare the two devices themselves. There both completely different, they have different processors, different amounts of RAM, different size screens and different camera resolutions. I will however drop in a little pros/cons, because that’s slightly fairer! This comparison is all about the operating systems they run

Samsung Galaxy Pro – Pros/Cons

• The weight of the device is pretty light weighing in at only 105g! Although the Bold is only 143g, it feels remarkably lighter. 
• The screen is at least .5 times bigger. Again, this may only seem like a small amount, but when your already dealing with pretty small phones this makes a big difference.
• For me, the battery life doesn’t seem to great. It can sometimes struggle to last a whole day. Wifi, GPS and Bluetooth are all disabled, and I’m not exactly a heavy user!

Blackberry Bold 9780 – Pros/Cons

• Blackberry messenger. Its fantastic! I cant figure out why its so popular.. Probably because of the amount of users now using it. But its quick and easy to use, and i quite like the fact you can see when messages have been read! I understand there is google talk, but it just doesn’t seem as popular
• Although the camera quality itself isn’t great.. It does have a flash which is damn handy! Ill give this 50 pro/50 con.. Pro the flash, con the camera quality.
• The blackberry is rather restricted in what you can change.. And something so minute but something i find so frustrating:- When entering a phone number, it automatically saves it as a work number! I’ve only ever entered a work number once, every over time its a mobile number! So stop saving it as a damn work number.
• 3G seems to be horrendously slow.. Bit strange as 3G is 3G and it should be the same speed whatever modern phone your using.. But web browsing seemed to take forever!

Customisation

Earlier on i mentioned a sad but unfortunately true niggle of mine. That the blackberry automatically saves contacts numbers as a work phone number. Blackberrys are now growing more and more popular, and phone numbers are still defaulting to being saved as ‘work’, something which we cannot change! When buying a phone, you expect a certain amount of customisation, at least on the OS level (As opposed to sticking a pink sparkly case on the outside). Changing backgrounds and moving icons around are the basics of customizing your phone, and that seems to be where the blackberry gave up!

With the Android OS, your given much more flexibility about how you want your phone to look and operate. You can move icons around, resize icons, put icons into pretty folders, change wallpapers, add multiple screens, add widgets, add shortcuts.. The list goes on! The Blackberry is limited because of its launcher. The desktop of the phone is rather bland, only showing the wallpaper, but allowing you to bring up a ‘drawer’ which contains all of the icons neatly organised. The Android launcher is the key to its flexibility. Bored of the current launcher? Nevermind! You can get a new one. Bored of your blackberry launcher? Tuff, your stuck with it! (The launcher is what you use to launch applications. There are many different launchers for Android that function in different ways catering to the different types of users)

App Stores

The Android has the marketplace, whilst the Blackberry has the app world. At the time of writing this, the app world only has 38,753 apps compared to the marketplace which has a whopping 250,000+ apps. The amount of apps on each devices app store isn’t the only way to measure the app stores ‘success’, the quality of the apps is also of great importance. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox and Skype work well on all devices, i wouldn’t really say any implementation of these apps on a certain device is better than the other. But if we look through the app stores at the other apps, the app world has an awful lot less junk than the market place. This could be down to the complex nature of developing blackberry apps, but it could simply be down to the popularity of the device itself. Small developers aren’t going to target devices with a small user base!

Even if a large selection of apps on the android market place are junk/pretty darn useless, the market place easily wins out. Its really easy to use and highly colorful. The app world is black, with color only in the apps icon. Its hard to use, slow, and offers a port rating mechanism.  If you know exactly what your looking for then the app world will work just fine, but for taking a browse and having a look around, the market place wins hands down. (As you can see from the screenshots, the marketplace is more more colorful compared to the app world! I certainly know which one id prefer to long at…)

And the winner is…

I could sit and write loads more about the two OS’s… But after a quick look back i think I’ve already written far to much! All the more reason for me to skip this whole writing thing and do a video next time!

But which OS is better? Thats a matter of opinion. Both have there advantages and disadvantages, but the clear winner to me is Android. Android is such a clean, slick and speedy OS. Theres nothing i cant do on the Android and theres always going to be an app for anything and everything i could imagine! (Even if you do just want to sit around and press buttons to make fart noises)

Anyway… All of the above is pretty unimportant anyway as the clear decider between the two OS’s would have to be “Does it play Angry Birds?” Android yes, Blackberry no.. We have a clear winner there folks!