It’s been well over two months since I bought my very first Android phone, and I have never looked back. At the time of my purchase, the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket was (and perhaps still is) the most powerful phone on the market. Using Android over iOS is like night and day. I literally deserve being punched on the face for not switching to Android sooner. In terms of the applications that I’m interested, they are pretty much Android only. It’s truly amazing that without a non-rooted Android phone, I’m still able to download an SSH server and client application and install it on without a problem, in addition of downloading a file manager and move files through out the phone’s Linux file system, this is something that it’s practically impossible on the iPhone without having to jailbreak the phone. In my eyes the reason Android is also much better than an iOS, is the fact that the phone is not locked and tied down to a proprietary application like iTunes. Now that I’m an Android user, to think that having to connect a phone to a computer in order to update, backup, or load up media is just flat out ridiculous and quite frankly the thought of it does not feels modern, sure Apple will probably address this limitation and market the feature as if they invented it just like they did with multitasking among other things, but I digress. Android can be updated using an built-in OS application (assuming Samsung plans on updating Android since the device came with Gingerbread). To add media to my phone such as songs, and movies, I simply use scp provided by the SSHDroid application.

Android is definitely not perfect. One major drawback I noticed immediately is the lack of a decent battery life. Since I use my phone as an mp3 player as well, it is practically impossible to listen to music on my phone for about 7 hours and not have its battery die. Thus said, for any *nix geek and true tech enthusiast, Android is the way to go. In my opinion iOS on the iPhone it simply doesn’t look and feel modern compared to Android Gingerbread on a Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket.

The following three applications are a must have for Android users:
rsync backup for Android
SSHDroid
File Manager