Tales From Jakarta: The One Shoed Man

Local Beer

On our first night in Jakarta we visited Stadium, having read so many good things online about the place. We stumbled out of the club at four a.m., discussing philosophy for some reason, and looked for a cab to take us back to the hotel. Now we knew that in Jakarta we had to be careful, which is why we wanted to take a cab as quickly as possible, so as to avoid staggering around at night. We figured once we were in a cab we were home free, wrong.

Out of the club and walking along the main road we were sort of shepherded into a cab. The cab driver paid some money to our shepherd, which we all thought was weird, and we were off to our hotel. Now for some reason the topic of the night seemed to be philosophy so we were all engrossed in a discussion about our own mortality and the meaning of things as we drove back. Halfway through my explanation of Indra's Net we realized that things started looking less and less familiar and that we had been in the cab for longer than felt right. 

There was a real language barrier for us in Jakarta and trying to communicate with our very local cab driver seemed futile. Still as we asked if we were going the right way and if he knew the hotel he reassured us by making an approving grunt and pointing forward. This kept on for a couple more minutes, by this time discussion had stopped as we watched the road intently, until we got onto a bridge. Here the whole car seemed to shake and then shut off. "Out of gas."

The car slowly rolled to a stop on the bridge, the driver repeating "taxi dead, no gas" before going out to the front of the cab to pop the hood and verify that there indeed is no gas, how you are able to determine this by looking in the front of the car is beyond me. 

So we got out of the cab, noticed we were on a bridge over a landfill of some sort, and had no idea whatsoever about where we were. As the cabbie came over to the sidewalk with us I made an important observation whose implications would reverberate throughout the rest of the trip [not really], the cab driver had one shoe! 

As we stood there dumb struck, and still a bit drunk, we were debating about whether it would be good to try and walk to the hotel, the driver had assured us we were close and it was "this way", or to try and hail another cab. It was about this point that we all noticed something else, it was prayer time in Jakarta. The sounds of  the prayer mixed with the ridiculousness of the man having one shoe and the slight danger in all of this made the event ridiculous. 

Eventually another cab came over and picked us up, we had to pay off the one shoed driver something and ended up giving him less than half of the metered price. Turns out we were going in the opposite direction although we were pretty close to our hotel. As our new fully shoed driver made a U-turn we noticed that the last cab had magically created gas and was now off the road. Less than five minutes later we were back at the hotel and could laugh at the whole ordeal. 

The moral of the story: only take blue bird group cabs in Jakarta. 

Review: Nexus S

Nexus S

After owning my new Nexus S for about a week or so I thought it would be good to compare it to the iPhone since that seems to be a popular thing now-a-days.

Note: I will be comparing the Nexus S with my old phone which was the iPhone 3GS except when I reference specs acquired from Phone Arena.

Phone Features

One of the big news items about the Nexus S and the new Android OS is NFC support, which is a new technology that Google seems to be trying to push in the US. Another huge advantage that the Nexus S has is the ability to create wi-fi hotspots, which is a bigger feature if you consider apple's reluctance to allow tethering. Also, the fact that you can use the Nexus S as an external hard drive, and do more than just get photos off the phone.

Another feature of android phones are the search, menu, back, and home buttons. Although I wasn't used to having all these buttons at first, they are very helpful. The menu button especially, because it frees up more of the screen for the applications. The iPhone has only the single home button.

The iPhone does, however, have an external vibrate button, which I found useful.

Winner: Nexus S

Camera

The Nexus S has a 5 megapixel rear camera and a .3 megapixel front camera. In addition the rear camera has an LED flash. Although, my old 3GS only had a rear camera the iPhone 4 has the same camera specs as the Nexus S.

Also, while both the Nexus S and the iPhone 4 can record video, only the iPhone 4 records in 720p.

Winner: iPhone

Battery Life

According to the specs the Nexus S has a better stand-by battery life compared to the iPhone 4, however, in practice I've found that the battery life on my Nexus S is comparatively worse to my old 3GS. This could be due to how the phone handles background tasks, which might be my fault for not managing correctly but it still translates into worse battery life.

I use my mobile phone as an alarm and therefore leave the phone unplugged on my bed. Upon waking up I've found that the Nexus S has lost more battery life through the night than the iPhone did.

Winner: iPhone

This time, it's personal

Apps

I know that Steve Jobs has made a huge deal about the number of applications available for iOS devices, however, I've found that this number is heavily padded by games and other fun apps like sound boards. With the exception of my mobile banking application, I haven't been missing any application.

Also, I've found that the Android applications do much more than iPhone applications. While apple made a big fuss about allowing the Opera mini web browser through their secretive approval process there's no less than five web browsers for Android. These alternative "stock" apps don't stop at web browsers, don't like your sms app? Download another. Don't like the phone dialer? Download another.

Additionally, although there's been a lot of news about malaware applications on the Android marketplace, Android also allows you to see exactly what parts of your phone any application accesses. This way you can see whether a game application wants to see your contact list. I've found that it's not necessarily true that the iOS apps are safer, it's just that Android apps expect more from the user.

Another big advantage of Android applications are widgets, which you can add to your home screens. Widgets can provide application functionality without having to launch the application, so you can have your twitter feed on the home screen without having to launch the twitter app.

Winner: Nexus S

Text Entry

This is one area in which the iPhone winds hands down. The iPhone not only offers inline spellchecker, which the Nexus S doesn't, but handles text manipulation better. Controls for copy, paste, and text selection on the Nexus S are intuitive but it requires popup screens which should not be the case. Also, the text selector on the Android gets in the way more often than not.

Winner: iPhone

Voice Control

Although both phones offer voice control, the Android has more robust support. The Android voice control is incorporated into the keyboard which lets you use voice text entry across different applications, which means you can do a voice email entry, voice web search, or even voice enter your name for a game. In addition to this there are more stock actions [call, play song, next, etc] on the Android.

Winner: Nexus S

Customization

On a normal iPhone the customization is limited to changing wallpapers, contact photos, and ringtones to some extent. In the case of making ringtones I had to edit a file in Audacity, send it to GarageBand, and finally share it as a ringtone. Choice of notification tones can only be made from a list of included ones.

On the Nexus S adding different sounds for ringtone, alarm, and notifications is as easy as copying files to the correct folder, that's it. No worries about proper file format, iPhone ringtones have their own proprietary format, or which application to use.

Winner: Nexus S

Jailbreaking/Rooting

The iPhone can be jailbroken which allows you to take more control of your iPhone and do things like customize icons, home screen appearances, add support for different application launchers, etc. When I had my iPhone I thought of jailbreaking as a necessity to truly get the most of your phone, I'm noticing that jailbreaking your iPhone gives you access to features and functionality that you get on an Android without having to modify the OS.

Although I have not rooted my Android, yet, it seems to give you more functionality than a jailbroken iPhone has. I see the two different processes as this: jailbreaking an iPhone allows you to become the admin of your system, rooting an Android allows you to change the system.

Winner: Nexus S

Sync

One of the benefits of smartphones is the ability to sync information like contacts, calendar events, and music with your computer. On the iPhone this is handled by the apple suite: iCal, Address Book, iTunes, etc. although there is some support for other sources. However, it still seems that you are tied to a single computer, for example the address book that my phone syncs with is the one on my personal laptop.

Android phones aren't as tied to a single computer because most of the sync features are done with a google account. This means that the address book, calendar, and applications are synched with your google account, the same google account that you can access through any computer. For example, if your phone dies and you need to get a number from your address book you can log in to google and check from there. Also, I could never really get my email to push to my iPhone which isn't a problem on the Nexus S. 

The one clear sync advantage the iPhone has is music, the iTunes + iPhone combo beats anything I've been able to find on the Android and as a matter of fact trying to get my Nexus S to sync to my music collection caused me to delete all my music from my laptop, by accident, seriously. 

Winner: Nexus S

Conclusion

Comparing the scores the iPhone won three categories [text entry, battery life, camera] while the Nexus S won the remaining six [phone features, apps, voice control, customization, rooting, and sync]. Overall I feel like the Nexus S is more of a computer than a phone, which for me is a huge geek advantage. With my old iPhone if there was something I couldn't do [let's say download big apps over 3G] I felt as if it was the phone's fault and felt stuck, with the Nexus S if I can't do something I feel like it's only because I haven't found it yet, because of all the flexibility the phone gives you. 

So I know there's a bunch of hype for the iPhone and I know if Jobs mentioned that the white iPhone 4 would be coming out tomorrow there'd be a line forming everywhere before he finished his sentence, but don't believe the hype, do the right thing, get an Android.