Before you go out and buy a new Android smartphone, here are some important things you need to keep in mind.
Considering that Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, it’s more likely than not that at any point in time that someone will be shifting over from iOS, Windows Phone or Blackberry to an Android phone. While Android has built up a reputation, accurately, as an OS that you can do plenty with, there are still some restrictions in play that you should know about.
1. The storage issue:
Most Android phones come with a limited amount of internal storage (think anything from 4 to 16GB) but also support microSD cards. Now, about 30 to 40% of that internal storage is inaccessible and used up by the system, the interface etc. This means that in a 4GB Android phone, in the best case, you’ll have access to about 2.8GB. This becomes a serious problem if you’re planning to install a lot of heavy apps or games on any Android phone that comes with Ice Cream Sandwich or newer. The apps necessarily install themselves on the internal storage and even if your phone (or an app) allows you to ‘move’ the apps to the SD card, it will only move a minor portion of the data. For e.g. in the case of the game Asphalt 8: Airborne, that takes up 1.2GB, an inconsequential 65MB gets moved to the SD card. As a result, if you bought a 4GB Android phone, you won’t be able to install Real Racing 3 (1.8 GB with all assets downloaded) and Asphalt 8 at the same time.
About the only large things you can move to the SD card are music, videos and photos. Therefore, if you’re picking up a new Android phone make sure you do so after carefully weighing what all you’d like to install and use on the phone.
2. The music:
Once upon a time, the audio quality that you could expect from your phone used to vary wildly depending on the actual phone. Since that time, we’ve reached a spot where things like audio quality and music playback have pretty much been standardized, or at least that’s what we’d like to believe. If you plan to spend a lot of time listening to music on your phone, then you should research the music playing abilities of the phone/s you’re planning to buy because if you don’t, you may end up regretting your purchase. This is especially true for Android phones, since there is a large variety of phones from different manufacturers and with different hardware.
For instance, the Huawei Honor 6 is a great phone overall but is one of the worst I’ve come across when it comes to both audio quality and volume, both things that can’t be improved with the help of countless DSP or Equalizer apps. When I was considering buying the Honor 6, that was pretty much the deal breaker, and it may be the same for you as well.
If audio quality is important to you, make sure you try out the phone either at a showroom or with the help of someone who already owns it or at least use the Internet to figure out other buyers’ experiences.
3. The curse of freedom:
One of the things that usually gets spouted whenever someone’s praising Android is the ‘freedom’ it offers. Freedom to choose what you want from your phone or how it works is great but if you have no particular idea about what it is that you want, the same freedom can be a curse. Just like with Windows, Android has a huge number of apps that claim to perform certain activities slightly better and offer more functionality. If you go about installing all of them without researching them first, at best you’ll quickly fill up your phone storage and at worst, you may make your phone a lot slower and more susceptible to hanging and crashing.
There are an insane number of Cleaner apps on the Play Store
As with anything, make sure that you read up about the best apps for any activity and only download those. You can also just rely on the default apps on your phone if they happen to do everything you are looking for.
4. The beauty of freedom:
On the other hand, there may be many apps out there that can radically change the way you can use the phone for the better. For instance, if your phone comes with Google Play Music or some other unknown default app for playing music, you can do so much better with the likes of a Power Amp, a MusixMatch or an N7 music player.
PowerAmp is a great music player app to replace the default player.
If you find the default UI of your phone unnecessarily complicated or ugly, you can opt for different themes and looks with the help of launcher apps like Themer or Nova Launcher. You can also try out an app like IFTTT that can help you increase the speed of plenty of common actions on your phone.
Themer offers a large number of themes to change the look of your phone.
Just remember, if you are willing to spend some time doing research, you’ll find that Android’s potential is limitless.
5. The migration:
Provided you’ve been using Gmail or other Google services on your old non-Android phone, or on your PC, a lot of the data that you’d want on your new Android phone is easy to migrate over. All you need is to input your Google account details on your new phone and you should be done. However, when it comes to moving things like your messages, WhatsApp history or notes from, let’s say, an old iPhone, things get a little more complicated.
For instance, if you want to migrate over messages from iPhone to Android, you’ll have to download a couple of apps and delve into the iPhone backup, nothing really complicated, but still complicated enough to turn off basic users.
So, if you’re planning to make the big move, make a neat list of what all you’d like to migrate from your old phone and then figure out the best (and easiest) ways to make that happen.
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