Episode 4 – Gingerbread

This is a series of blog posts documenting my switch from iPhone to Android. To read the whole exciting saga, click here.

I’m trying to do a fair comparison between my year-old iPhone 5 and an Android phone, but a disclaimer would be appropriate — my Android phone is almost 4 years old.

I didn’t want to buy a new phone to start this experiment off, so I thought I’d start with a used phone, learn the environment, see where it came from, and then look at the differences between Gingerbread and the new OS on a new phone.

Google’s “Gingerbread” OS was released in February of 2011, and is still in use on low-end phones manufactured today. While missing some of the features of newer phones, it’s still a viable release. I’ve found versions of most of the programs I use on a day to day basis, Firefox seems to do a good job rendering web pages on the phone, and there are theme add-ons to make Gingerbread look like the newer releases — or iOS if you’re so inclined.

There are some software compatibility issues with Gingerbread; I had to do a search to find OneNote 2010 and side-loaded it onto the phone; OneNote 2013 wouldn’t run on it. Dropbox wouldn’t either, but I can work around that. Snapseed, my favorite iOS photo editing app wouldn’t load, either.

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