iSwitched to Android Blog 30 Day Challenge Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,657 words · ~13 min read
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got things like news, giveaways, um, gaming stuff, all kinds of
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interesting things. I think mostly the giveaways are going to be what drive most people to download it. But check it
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out. VIP Tech Zone. Welcome to day one
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of my Android I switch. So, let's start with the actual phone itself. The screen
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is extremely accurate. So, if you're trying to do something like uh make a
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correction to a URL, there's a pretty good chance that I can get it even with
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my thumb. This is also something that I love about Android compared to iOS and
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Windows Phone. You don't have to use the
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accurate cursor here. You can usually go, okay, I'm going to try and get it
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here. And it'll at least give you a shot at it before it gives you the option to
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correct what you've done. So, the screen is very accurate, which makes that
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actually work a lot of the time. The stock keyboard layout does feel a little
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bit weird. Look, look at what they've done here. So, these middle keys are
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actually wider, and I understand why that is, cuz if you have small hands,
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they're going to be easier to reach in the middle. But, it does make typing on it a little bit awkward because I expect
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the keys to be the same size. I also expect these two bezels to be the same.
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So, what I found myself doing sometimes is sort of typing on one side of the
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keyboard and missing things like the left shift. It's not the end of the world and I'll just get download a
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keyboard app such as Swift Key or Swipe I think are two of the popular ones. No
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matter what you want to play play back, they can get extremely loud with no
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distortion. They weren't quite as loud as Diesel's Galaxy Note 2, but
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definitely loud enough that you could actually be doing something and
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listening to it in the in over something else. So, check this out.
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So, for contrast, this is me talking in a normal conversational voice with Big
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Buck Bunny running in the background. So, it's as easy to hear as someone
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talking to you from, you know, like a foot away. NX NFC is a huge plus. So,
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I've already used it a couple times. Um, I would have liked to see wireless
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charging. I hate micro USB. I think I'm well documented as being a hater of
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micro USB. It's an extremely fragile connection and I wish it would just die,
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but it seems to have just become a standard for some reason when mini B,
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like there's no reason you couldn't have put a mini B here. I'm not convinced
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micro USB actually improves the slimness
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of devices. Batterywise, I've had a lot of people ask me about this. So, check
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this out. I've been using this all day. This is day one. Um, it's midnight is
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after midnight now. I've watched at least 3 hours of videos on the phone,
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uh, whether with headphones or with speakers throughout the day. I've made some calls. I've done some tweets. I've
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used it the way I would in a pretty heavy workload day. This is a weekend.
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So, while I didn't make as many calls, I was definitely streaming video over it
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much more often. I am extremely impressed. Compared to my older iPhone
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4, which in its defense was a little bit on the older side, um this is way more
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usable. And compared to the HTC 8X running Windows phone, streaming video
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using emit, which is the app that I've got as my replacement for air video. Uh
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so using emit is much less demanding on the phone and on the battery life than
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the uh Windows phone equivalent which I can't remember the name of for the life
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of me. So emit is something I would consider to be actually a suitable
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replacement for air video. It starts up extremely quickly. I'm not going to play
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this back because I'm worried about any kind of copyright infringement on the
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video. But there you go. It starts very quickly, very responsive. You have to run a server app on a computer in the
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household. But awesome. Um, so I figure I could get through two light days with
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this, no problem, which is exciting. However, I'm not using 4G because this
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isn't 4G in my area yet. Uh, hopefully I'll be swapping it out at some point.
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And I'm not using wireless AC. With that said, it's pretty sweet that it supports
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wireless AC because Anantech actually posted an article on this saying they
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got up to 275 megabit tested, not
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theoretical, on this phone using wireless AC. So, I have an AC router in
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the mail on the way to me, and hopefully I'll be able to update you guys on that
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uh sometime soon. The auto rotate's a little bit hyperactive. Um, so this has
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been this has been bothering me a little bit. So, let's say I wanted to reply to
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a tweet. Uh, normally I would um I'd go,
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okay, maybe I'm, you know, laying doing something. Watch how quickly it auto
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rotates. And there it goes. So, I'm actually only I'm I'm only halfway
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between horizontal and vertical, and it's auto rotated already, which for
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some people, maybe this seems like a a fairly small complaint, and it actually
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is. It's a beautiful phone. There's no way I'm going back to the iPhone 4 after
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this, having spent only a day with it so far. But I wish it was a little bit more
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like, yeah, I want you to rotate, then it then it would rotate versus I'm
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halfway in between. Like, with the iPhone 4, you could kind of go, yeah,
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no, do this. And then you could kind of play with it a little bit and and get it
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close so you could kind of use it. Um, also I wish that like TouchWiz, I wish
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that HTC's interface had a quick auto rotate here. However, there's got to be
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an app for that or something. Uh, screen's amazing. The viewing angle's
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outstanding. Here, I'll just give you guys like a browser page to look at or
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maybe like here's a Here, let's play back an unboxing. You guys can see what
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it looks like. Unboxing. Speakers are loud. So, you can see what
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it looks like headon and then you can see what it looks like from the side.
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There's no color shift. It uses super LCD 3, so you don't get any of that
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weirdness that Samsung has with their AMO LED screens where they are actually
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slightly higher resolution in some colors versus other colors. Text is
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extremely crisp. This is the kind of thing I can't convey through a video
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like this. But um no matter how small the text is on the screen, I can read it
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clearly even at a distance because it is
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so crisp. It's really really nice. Uh Zoe's Zoies or whatever they're called.
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So, you open up the camera app and there's an option that you click on
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right here and you go, "Okay, I want to record a Zoey." So, let's have a look at
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my FPS Doug poster here. So, I go, you
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can see there's a little bar going. So, it's taking some still pictures as well
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as a video. And what it does with uh
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with those is it allows you to either see like a sort of a one to two second
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video capture moment or a still image. And so, it's a neat way of capturing
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both at full res at the same time. and uh and and getting a moment sort of even
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if you would have missed it with the uh and the shutter's quick so the odds of
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missing it are slimmer but even if you would have missed it check out the gallery for a minute though guys uh so
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here's the I want to show you guys the highlight reel feature okay so here it
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sorts things into events so my photos events so I can go I can pick a day you
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can you can move things in and out of different events and it does so up at
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the top so all the individual things are down here and then up at the top it as a
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highlight reel. So, it'll automatically set it to
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music and it'll add a bunch of cuts. It'll add some kind of effect. I'd love
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to see what HTC is going to do with this over time in terms of adding more music,
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uh, more effects, more cool stuff like that. But, it's a really neat way to
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review the photos and videos that you took throughout a day in about 30
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seconds. So, if you're showing someone with a short attention span, which let's
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face it, we all have short attention spans these days. Um, it's a it's a just
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a really cool effect. Let's uh let's watch the highlight reel for this day.
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It just does it automatically. So, there's the baby
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using the phone. It puts like a film grain effect on it. All of this is
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without any work whatsoever. Here he is trying to drink
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some water.
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And just the fact that it's jumping around to uh to different different
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angles, different points in the movie all the time makes it very impactful. So
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I'd love to be able to put my own music on it, which is another thing. Uh the
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haptic feedback on this phone is excellent. So some uh some phones, some
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devices, you touch it and the whole thing kind of goes and it just feels
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crappy. It feels cheap. Uh not on this one. It's very tight, very very
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responsive. The default app loadout is not bad. I'm not sure if I'm a big fan
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of the blink feed here. So, this is just uh social media and like sort of other
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things like updates. Uh but you don't have to make that your home. You can set
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to more of a standard Android home. Um and then this interface here is a
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vertical scrolling interface, kind of more like gingerbread. Um not sure if
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I'm a big fan of this either. So, I think I'm going to go for the default
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Android layout once I've had more time to personalize it and add the apps that
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I want. Oh, speaking of apps, the default
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app loadout is not bad. So, I mean, they've got things like Soundhound on
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here, which is awesome. The music app needs a lot of work. The UI is uh not
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great on this one. So, things like uh like just little simple stuff like if
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you search for something, uh so, so I
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don't know, let's find my Ace of Bass. If you search for something, it doesn't
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have this option here to add it to a playlist. Whereas, when you're just
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going through your songs, you can see there's here there's a bunch of options for things you can do with it. So, it
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needs some uh it needs to be refined a little bit. I just found it not that
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easy to Oops. Not that easy to navigate.
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Um, but here, let's go. So, you've got your media apps, your Google apps. It
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comes with Twitter. Uh, it comes with car, maps, clock. Productivity wise, it
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comes with Dropbox. Almost everything you see here was preloaded on the phone.
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Nothing unnecessary and stupid. So, um, I mean, okay, I don't know if all of
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it's necessary. I haven't dug through it. This is all stuff that I added so
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far. Uh, Beats audio seems to be just an EQ setting. not that impressed in terms
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of the overall audio quality over headphones coming from the iPhone 4. So,
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let's uh let's talk general Android. I wouldn't mind if there was an easier way to see battery life percentage, but I'm
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sure there's a widget or an app for that or something. Moving from a platform
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that does not have great app support, like Windows Phone 8, is uh is just a
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breath of fresh air. Being able to go, okay, I need I need a scanner app. I
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need a movie streaming app. I need whatever. There's something there for
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sure. you want to change the fonts on your phone, you might have to root it for that. Actually, I'm not sure. I
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recently rooted my wife's Droid DNA um and installed a custom ROM on it and
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everything. So, I'm familiarizing myself with the with the platform as much as I
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can. And there's a lot of really cool options when you do that, but I won't be rooting the HTC1 during my 30-day period
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with it. I'm going to be using actually Sense 5.0 hasn't bothered me yet. So,
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this is this is one thing. I mean, I'm not this isn't something that I think
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I'll end up using. Um, and Blink Feed's kind of the kind of thing that I would,
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it's uh, it's sort of like the people app on Windows Phone 8 where it's like, okay, here's another some interesting
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stuff and I love highlight reels and those are good. The camera on this thing
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is awesome. So, here's just a video of the baby eating eggs. Just Oh, looks so
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good. Okay, well, that was a very short video. Oh, that was Oh, that was a Zo or
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a Zoey. Native Twitter app is so
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superior to the iPhone one. On the iPhone one, you'll reach the top and
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it'll go loading, loading, loading, and then you can scroll up again. So, when
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there's been a lot of them, it used to be you could double click on it in the iPhone 1 and it would just go to the
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top. But, uh, yeah, this one's butter smooth interfacing with this thing,
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which is just awesome. So, overall, I'm
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pretty much sold on Android at this point, but there will still be more updates. I'm not just going to cop out
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and go, "Yeah, day one, Android wins." Uh, so stay tuned, guys. Don't forget to
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