When my long-time friend Kirk McElhearn, a prolific author and commentator, told me ahead of doing an episode for The Tech Night Owl LIVE this week, that he had purchased an Android smartphone, I paused for as second. After a very few high-profile Mac journalists made well-publicized switches from the iPhone to Android earlier this year, I wondered whether Kirk would be among them.

But he was merely doing what I did last February, which was to have an extended exposure to that other mobile platform. My move become possible because Samsung’s PR agency was only too happy to send me two of their flagship Galaxy handsets for review. I could even hang onto them for a while if I only added the units to my wireless account. So I proceeded to retire an iPhone 4S, and give Android its due.

As most of you know, I attempted to largely duplicate the iPhone experience on Google’s platform with mixed success. I never found an email app that was truly reliable, although one, InoMail, did make a worthy effort to duplicate the look and feel of Mail for iOS. Worse, some apps, such as Time magazine and GCN’s player software, which streams their 70 network radio shows, wouldn’t work reliably, or, in the case of the latter, at all.

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This article was posted on Monday, December 2nd, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: Android, GCN, Google, iOS, Iphone, iPhone 4S, Kirk McElhearn, Mail, Samsung, Samsung Galaxy, smartphone.