Episode 1 – Making the Switch to Android

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

I’ve been an iPhone user for several years. I like Apple’s application support, and I’ve learned to work around the quirks in iTunes, the quirky support for Outlook connectivity and ActiveSync, and quirks with reminders and alarms that I never had a problem when I carried a Blackberry.

Back in my Blackberry/WinAMP days, I kept my music arranged by folders and didn’t pay attention to metadata. iTunes made a mess of things and I spent the better part of a couple of years adding metadata to my music files – including album artwork, using programs to scrape lyric sites to add lyrics to songs, adding genre information, learning how to make a compilation of 300 songs by 300 artists show up as a compilation instead of 300 1 song listings…

I’ve spent a lot of time working around the Apple ecosystem, and wanted to see how Google does things with Android. I picked up an older Android phone from work and will document my findings here. I’ll need to migrate my music to my new phone, migrate personal applications to Android, come up with a photography workflow with equivalent apps to what I have on iPhone and migrate my work email, contacts, tasks and chat/IM to the new phone.

I’m using a Motorola Atrix 4G for my Android phone experiment. The phone was pretty impressive in 2011, but showing signs of age in 2015.

Modes	WCDMA 850 / 1900 / 2100 GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Weight	4.77 ozÂ Â (135 g)
Dimensions	4.64″ x 2.5″ x 0.45″Â Â (118 x 64 x 11.4 mm)
Battery	Talk: 9 hours max.Â Â (540 minutes) Standby: 250 hours max.Â Â (10.4 days) 1930 mAh LiIon, Removable
Display	Type: LCD (Color TFT/TFD) Resolution: 540 x 960 pixels 4″ Â diagonal Colors: 16.7 million (24-bit)
OS / Platform	Android version 2.2/2.3
Processor	1 GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 AP20H
Memory	16 GB internal storage, raw hardware 1 GB RAM
SIM card size	Traditional / Mini (2FF)
FCC ID	IHDP56LS1 Â» (Approved Jan 20, 2011) IHDP56LS2 Â» (Approved May 25, 2011)