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A few questions on Android phones

And a gazillion of menu layers. The menu structure on a Nokia phone is usually hopelessly complicated and an absolute labyrinth of menu page after menu page that makes no sense.
The iOS menu structure is usually one level deep. Mostly because features “just work” without the need to setup a handful of parameters. Awesome.

The problem is that you cannot deliver a lot of functionality in just one layer. Well you could, but you would have a huge config page.

The “Nokia way” dates back to when Nokia owned the world and if a big company bought 1000 of their phones, there would be a dedicated sysadmin bloke who sorted out the config and deployed it company-wide. (Like happens with PCs at work). Hence a lot of stuff (e.g. the VPN config) is accessible only with a config tool, not via the phone menus.

The “Apple way” is to have a committee which decides what say 90% want, and they force it through as a standard. They have the brand leadership in the wealthy world and have the power to do this. Nobody else could have for example decided that Flash is crap and forced the web world to more or less abandon it. Apple pulled it off. The drawback is that when you want to say config an IPSEC VPN, it turns out that the device has been hard coded mainly for several specific (and fairly high-end) Cisco routers and that’s it. Again, Apple are able to force that through.

The “modern Android way” by market leaders (e.g. Samsung) is to emulate Apple. A load of menu items have been removed.

If I had Firefox, Safari or Chrome on my Nokia 808, I would never change it, because the rest of it “just works” and the 40MP camera is great. Anyway, the S6 should be here tomorrow so I can report on the camera on that

From your linked post

One of two conclusions can be made based on a new survey from Chitika, the online ad network and data analytics firm. Either Microsoft has been doing an abysmal job of selling the company’s new Surface tablet, or their customers don’t surf the Internet.

I often wonder that too, because firms like Opera still appear to be in business, while the browser type stats on any website that reveals them (and I can see them on EuroGA) show that there are zero people using it (or there are 274 hits which are all from my Nokia 808).

Quite what this tells us I don’t know in the MS or Opera case, but I suspect that Opera or MS are not achieving zero sales. Instead, the user community is severely fragmented so e.g. those who use Opera are all living in Mongolia and never visit any English language website, so while there are 3M of them, they show up as zero on any 1st World web server stats. That’s a daft example obviously but it makes the point. Or maybe not so daft because it could be that Opera happens to have a Mongolian programmer working for them and it is the only browser which correctly renders the Mongolian language so Opera has a 100% market share in Mongolia, which at say €10 a copy would be a nice business for a small software company. Or you could sell 500M devices to rural China, where English is spoken by say 0.01% of the users and again you will see massively skewed user data on any US/European server.

I see this sort of thing all the time in GA, where I might talk to 10 pilots who tell me the most appalling stories about a particular company, while at the same time the pilot forums are full of posts praising the same company. When you have seen something like that many times, you come to believe that anything is possible when it comes to statistics in which the body collating them doesn’t have the whole picture – usually because good quality research involves a lot of legwork which few people want to do.

I cannot believe that IOS devices get “used” more than Android devices. In fact I would argue that a phone of the type an anorak would carry (a Nokia 808 ) gets used the most, while the “modern slick” devices like Iphones get used mostly for multimedia consumption, and Android is somewhere in between the two and probably leaning increasingly towards the IOS end because that is where the market (the “dumb” users) is. Sitting on the Brighton-London train does tend to support this view.

Not that it matters, because when you see this

it is obvious which browsers a website has to work with

(BTW nearly all the “IE” is IE10).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I only know what I do with my iPhone, iPads …

- Contacts (synced over 5 devices)
- use as a torch
- Listen to German radio abroad
- Dropbox (i have a 1 TB account now and try to have everything important in there)
- make notes
- Navigate, Skydemon VFR
- Autorouter, Rocketroute Flight planning IFR
- Download Satellite Weather
- Books hotels and Flights
- Use as Car Navigation in rentals
- Read Books
- Watch House of Cards
- Do HD movies, Flying, my son playing tennis
- Make great photos
- tune guitars
- read news
- read and edit euro.GA
- Mobile Banking
- Wikipedia
- Facebook
- Driving log for my company car
- Alarm clock (:-))
- What’s App
- Password Manager
- amazaon and ebay
- Paypal
- Watch TV (Zattoo TV)
- Shazam
- Skype
- Record Music and edit it on 24 tracks
- youtube
- control my personal MTOM via wifi scale
- Control the GoPro
- Check where my kids are (via search my son’s iPhone)
- Read my magazine subscriptions (5)
- Edit images
- Post on my website, directly via email
- Send postcards to parents (via Postcard service)
- Translate texts
- Use dictionaries (French, Englishm some Japanese)
- Play some games
- Open and edite Excel files with Numbers
- Learn guitar parts with special apps that slow down music without changing pitch
- Play along guitar to Blues Jamtracks
- Pay electric guitar (guitar is connected to iPhone and iPhone to headsets)
- tune my daughter’s violin
- Listen to Music
- Browse the net
- Record audio of my daughter reciting poems

And many other things. And ALL of these my iPhone does perfectly. So why would I ever want something else?

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 08 Jun 12:43

I suspect this thread has long since passed the point where many users have clicked the “Hide” button, but for some it’s clearly interesting (and not to mention commercially relevant for me at least).

Peter, I am able to configure iOS devices to the VPN that both you and I use by typing in the server name and a couple of passwords. From that point one clicks the VPN button and it connects. That’s it. It just works.

I’ve not checked sources, but I’ve seen quite a few claims that iOS devices are used more than Android ones. That would also be an explanation for the prevalence of them showing up in server stats, even away from wealthy pursuits special interest websites like this one! I’m not sure it matters much though and it certainly doesn’t address the “which phone is best for me” question, which is sort of where we started this discussion.

Auto updates is an interesting topic. The fact that such a high proportion of iOS devices are running the latest version of the OS, as opposed to Android where it’s much more fragmented, is of real significance to developers. And as we’ve all said all along, developers matter because we users don’t actually give a toss who makes the the OS, we just want to use good programs that do what we want them to do.

Peter, it’ll be really interesting to see how you get on with your new phone. I’m still waiting for a use case scenario that iOS 8 doesn’t address, but I’m sure you’ll find some, being the edge case that you are!

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

These are the statistics for my website, www.airwork.biz

but I’ve seen quite a few claims that iOS devices are used more than Android ones

That is certain to be the case, since IOS exists only on devices which cost so much that few will want to waste them Whereas Android appears on a huge range of stuff, much of which is absolute crap (like that £150 chinese tablet I bought on which keystrokes appeared 2 seconds later).

Android will never catch up with this, despite Samsung’s eye wateringly overpriced S6 Edge whose sales will probably never be high.

I am able to configure iOS devices to the VPN that both you and I use by typing in the server name and a couple of passwords. From that point one clicks the VPN button and it connects. That’s it. It just works.

For an IPSEC VPN, which has about 30 parameters which the client cannot possibly guess and any one of which stops it working, it must be that the developers of that VPN decided to make it work with the IOS VPN function (originally Cisco based, I believe). Another example of Apple’s might, and that’s good.

These are the statistics for my website [windows phone 0.1%]

That data cannot possibly be representative of the www as a whole, because WP phones are moving out of the phone shops at a rate which is not amazing but is way way more than 0.1%. Same with Blackberry’s 0.1%. It comes back to my earlier comment about multiple user populations. I bet if you set up a site used by teenage girls, or possibly all women other than “corporate exec” types, the Blackberry figure would be 0.0001% (1ppm)

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

One of our websites, aimed at women between about 25 and 45, 80% UK, 20% elsewhere, has these number of sessions:

iOS 49.3%
Android: 22.9%
Windows: 18.9%
Mac: 5.4%
Windows Phone: 1.5%
Linux 0.5%
Chrome OS: 0.3%
Blackberry: 0.3%
Series40: 0.01%

And before someone says it, no, that Series 40 isn’t Peter. It’s nearly 1,000 people but I suppose he could be one of them!

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

I suppose he could be one of them!

Well it would not be the first time a male pilot had a female alternate personality… there is a well known case of that

I had to google on the S40. Didn’t even know it had a web browser. My first phone, after the 6310i (the best phone ever made – I still have some lying around) which didn’t have a browser was the E51 which was Symbian so had a marginally usable browser. It’s hard to believe people still use those devices. The 6310i I can understand (a 2 week battery life, super voice quality, and gets a GSM signal on the Moon) and it remains popular with a lot of people who just want a very good phone, but nobody can browse any real website with it. Email is just about marginally possible, text only, no attachments, and who is going to be sending you those?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I think nobody mentioned it yet: https://www.pushbullet.com
It works everywhere and it does wonders pushing files between desktops and devices in my mix of iOS/OSX and Android.
Really nice and free. I am not related the them in any way, except for being a user.

EHLE

It seems that uses the internet. For really super-fast file transfer you need something like SuperBeam or similar using wifi direct.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Internet is no good for general file transfer… I have just been to the Scilly Isles for a day, and mobile data was GPRS, 20kbits/sec or so. And the massive packet latency meant that even a POP (TLS/SSL) login would take 30-60 secs, so forget actually reading the emails

Obviously lots of people get fast connections, but stuff which works only sometimes, or even most of the time, is what they call “technology”

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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