7 Reasons I Love My Android

When I tell people I love my Android and have stopped using my iPhone. I usually get a lot of questions as to why. So I decided to compile the reasons so I don't have to keep repeating myself.

1. Navigation - even without a data connection. I live in Canada but I often travel to the U.S. for work. As a result while traveling I either don't have access to data on my phone, or it is very expensive. So instead I have many times used the wifi in the airport, or at work, or somewhere else to plan my route on my phone, and then let my phone navigate me, turn by turn, to my destination even though it no longer has a data connection. It works beautifully and I happily get to my destination.
2. Power Control - controlling battery usage. There are always a number of things using up your battery and possibly using up your data limits. The great things about the power control widget is that it gives you control over most of those things right on your home screen, you don't have to dig through various settings menus to turn things off if you aren't using them. So for example I usually just turn bluetooth off since I only need it when I am in the truck, but when I get in the truck it is only one tap of the finger to turn it on so I can use my phone hands free. Also if I am out camping for a couple of days it is easy to turn off everything such as wifi, bluetooth, gps, and screen brightness to make sure my phone will have the juice it needs to survive without being plugged in. I have a couple of other widgets on my home screen that also give me access to airplane mode, data, and portable hotspot so I can turn those things on and off easily as well.
3. Talk - text and video chat. Normally when I am at work or elsewhere Google Chat is how I communicate with my wife, and with a number of other people around me. Android allows me to easily move between using a laptop when one is close by or use my Android when that is what is available. The non-disruptive notification system on Android makes it even nicer. The only thing that I would like to see is to force voice only chat, if it can do video it currently doesn't give you an option between voice or video.
4. Contacts - syncing my Gmail contacts. It is very nice to easily have access to my regular gmail contacts right on my phone, it also makes it so you can edit your contacts in Gmail or on the phone, which ever I prefer, or method I have available. The one improvement that I would love to see here is to have a shared set of contacts, for example there are a number of contacts that both my wife and I use, and it would be nice if we could cooperatively keep them up to date. There may be a workaround of having a shared gmail account that we both use and our individual accounts but this seems like a poor method to solve this.
5. Organization of Apps - no searching through every folder. This is one thing I always struggle with whenever I go back to using an iPhone, finding an elusive app that I know is on the phone somewhere. It always turns into a game of opening one folder, nope, open another folder, nope, etc until you finally find it. On Android you can always just go to the app directory and scroll through all your apps alphabetically until you find what you are looking for, it also means that lesser used apps don't have to take up any space on your home screen.
6. Widgets - information at a glance. I love how on Android your applications have the ability to show you information right on the home screen. On my main home screen I have an Astrid widget to remind me what I should be doing, a calendar widget reminding me where I should be, and a weather widget telling me the current weather, and then a couple of app icons for my most commonly used applications. This means that as soon as I unlock my phone my most commonly used information is staring me right in the face.
7. Browser - reading actual websites. Finally the Android browser. Whenever I mention that I love the Android browser I always hear how the iPhone browser is so much better.  It probably is in many ways but the Android browser is heads and tails above when it comes to the one use case I care about, reading text on a webpage. Here is a simple test that I always get people to run. Open an iPhone and an Android to Wikipedia, not the mobile version but the normal desktop version and try to read the text. On an iPhone it is either too small, or involves scrolling back and forth constantly. On an Android you just double tap the text and it re-flows it perfectly, want it a little bigger, just zoom in a little more and it reflows it again. This works perfectly on almost every site I have been to. iPhone almost requires text heavy sites to create a mobile version in order to be usable.