This is really long. Just a heads up.
I've been using an iPhone since 2008. I decided to try a phablet last January. I waited until an IPS model hit the market. I pre-ordered the G Pro and received it on Friday. I returned it Sunday night. I spent most of my weekend using it.
For starters, I really like this phone and highly recommend it. In the end however I decided the weight in pocket and attempting one handed operations were too much for me. I also had great difficulty attempting to transfer my music onto the SD card and that soured my overall experience.
Let me start with the SD card slot. I purchased a new Sandisk 64 GB card from Staples and my G Pro had no problems reading the card. The issues arose as I attempted to transfer my iTunes collection onto my SD card via iSyncr. I followed the steps as directed, made sure that the sync was being applied to the SD card. For starters, the transfer itself was incredibly slow. Roughly 1 hour for 10 GB of music. Perhaps my slow Mac Mini is a factor in this. I don't know. I figured that wasn't the end of the world because it would hopefully be a one-time action. At the 23% mark I started to receive a Mac MTP Error message as the songs attempted to transfer to the card. I stopped the sync, wiped the data off the card, attempted the sync again, and received the same error at the same place again. I then attempted to wi-fi sync with iSyncr which only lead to a continuous message regarding my playlist and then after 10 minutes it would just stop attempting to sync.
Frustrated I went to DoubleTwist. Followed the steps. The desktop software recognized my G Pro, found my music. As I attempted to place the music onto my G Pro, nothing would happen. I did a Google search to see if I was doing something wrong but it appeared as if I wasn't. Nothing I tried got the music to being syncing over to my phone.
As I last ditch effort, I downloaded Android File Transfer. I tried to drag and drop just a few songs and kept receiving an error message.
That was a really frustrating experience. iTunes makes transferring music to my iPhone a pretty painless experience. I'm positive I was following the correct steps and it simply wasn't working for me. It's really important that I be able to transfer my music to the SD card (or internal storage). Streaming is simply not a perfect solution for me. I want my music locally available at all times. I have that with my 64 GB iPhone 5.
Back to the phone. The screen is remarkable. I have no complaints with it. AT&T was nice to provide the flip folio case to pre-orders. I liked it a great deal. After using a 4 oz iPhone 5 since launch I had to adjust to a 6 oz G Pro. It was something I felt I always noticed. Especially in my pant pockets.
Battery life appeared to be on-par with my iPhone 5. No better or worse. The plastic back didn't bother me. However it also wasn't great. I think the only truly good plastic back plates are ones with a tactile feel like you'll find on the Xperia ZL. The notification light is a really cool touch. The home button is fine. It should be thicker like the button on the S4/Note II but it's fine. I also think screen sizes this big would really benefit from on-screen buttons and not any capacitive or physical ones. Put on-screen buttons on that 5.5" screen and it will be easier to use with one hand plus you don't lose the width of the screen in portrait.
Navigating the Google Play store for the most part was a smooth experience. Some weird moments when trying to enter words into the search bar. But for the most part, no issues. Seeing the Play store icon in the menu bar after each download was a bit odd at first. Jelly Bean (Android?) really makes more use of the notification shade compared to iOS. In some ways this is good. (Controls for the music player, etc.) In some ways it gets annoying. It can also be confusing at times when you realize you need to use the back or menu button within an app. I'm sure this is something you get used to however over time.
When I logged into the Play store for the first time I used my most-used Gmail account. Soon after I found all my email contacts in my Phone app. I didn't want that. I deleted all the contacts in the Phone app and later learned that I had also deleted all those contacts within Gmail entirely itself. Suffice to say that really angered me. There are previous contacts that I no longer can get in touch with.
Roughly 85% of the apps that I use on my iPhone were in the Play store. But some of the apps that I use a lot were simply worse in their Android varient. (USA Today, The Weather Channel, Xfinity Remote, Echofon.)
Habit browser is sensational. One of my big worries going into the experience was finding something to compete with the smoothness of the Safari browser and I was really impressed by Habit.
The Gmail app. Wow. It looks terrible compared to Apple default Mail app. And I learned in a quick Google search that you need to download Nova Launcher Prime plus TelsaUnread in order to obtain number notification on the app itself. This isn't a huge deal but I was miffed that this was even required in the first place.
Pocket Casts is a great podcast app but I found it really odd that I could not organize the placement of the podcasts manually (on the main podcasts page). Also the Accuweather app seemed to take over my phone. I could not get rid of the degree icon in the upper left no matter how hard I tried. Eventually I deleted the app. Also I kept getting the GPS icon at random intervals. I ended up toggling off GPS and figuring I'd just turn it back one when really needed.
Widgets are cool and even though I was only using one or two this is something that iOS should offer. Ditto the easy toggles at the top of the notification shade. Also the Q Slide apps can be removed from the notification shade but you cannot remove the edit button entirely. So you are left with this ugly bar taking up space for QSlide apps you are not using.
Despite my issues I was overall impressed with Android. The SD card thing really was an issue though. I know countless others don't have this issue but it really bothered me. I wish Google would just make an iTunes like app that would allow you to manage your music beyond just storing it in their cloud service. Or I wish you could just pin the music for offline use directly onto the SD card without needing to root first. If I were to consider an Android phone in the future I think I would make 64 GB of internal storage a prerequisite just to avoid any issues in the future. I'd use a potential SD card slot for photos and videos (that I shot with the phone) only.
I still think phablets are here for good. I think there is a strong market for such a large phone and I think they will only get better in the future. (Lighter, etc.) I would even consider one in the future but only if it had on-screen buttons.
That doesn't mean my iPhone 5 is perfect. I'm starting to think that a 5" screen is my personal sweet spot. But at this point I think I'm okay waiting for Apple to release a 5" iPhone, and I think they will in due time. Probably not however until 2014.
Thanks for reading. Sorry for being all over the place. I'm just trying to recall things off the top of my head. Definitely came away impressed overall with Android.
