Foldable phones: Full of potential or just plain foolish?
TechRepublic’s Karen Roby sits down with ZDNet’s Jason Cipriani and Jason Perlow to explore the future of foldable devices and the smartphone industry. View the latest round of Jason vs. Jason.
You can add widgets for email and calendar apps, music players, cloud services. Google and Microsoft both have a large selection of widgets, and even Apple has an Android widget for its Apple Music player. In my experience, widgets are best used sparingly, but they really can improve productivity.
There’s a Back button.
For its first decade or so, iPhone had one and only one button, which you could tap, double-tap, or press and hold to accomplish tasks. Android, by contrast, historically included a row of three soft buttons along the bottom. The Home and Recents buttons function pretty much the same as the tap and double-tap options on a classic iPhone, but the Back button is unique.
On both platform, the dedicated app buttons are slowly disappearing, replaced by a series of gestures, but the concept of a dedicated Back function in Android remains. App developers try all sorts of tricks to replicate that functionality in iOS apps, with mixed results, but I miss the Back button every time I use an iPhone for any length of time.
You can clear all notifications with a single tap.
There is some sort of algorithm that governs the display of notifications on the iPhone home screen, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out. Sometimes there’s a big X that you can tap to clear older notifications; other times the only way to get rid of notifications is one at a time.
You can also manage how notifications are grouped and when they’re displayed on iOS, but to do that you have to exit Notification Center and go to Settings > Notifications.
On Android devices, both tasks are much simpler. When you swipe down to display current notifications, there’s a Clear All button at the bottom of the list. There’s also a Manage Notifications link that jumps directly to the associated page in Settings, where you can customize options for each app. Those are small touches, but they reduce friction and make everyday usability much better.
You can change your default browser.
On either mobile platform, browsers use the underlying engine supplied by the operating system. The main reason for using an alternate browser is to save and sync shortcuts, tabs, passwords, and history across devices.
On an iPhone, you can define Open With settings on a per-app basis, so the Gmail app opens links in Chrome or Outlook opens links in Edge. But you can’t define that browser preference systemwide, so if you open a link from another app, it will almost certainly open in Safari.
That’s not a problem in Android, thanks to the Default Apps setting, where you can specify which browser you want to use for links. While there, you can also choose alternate apps to use for phone calls, SMS messages, voice assist, and tap-to-pay functions, too.
The volume control is far more flexible.
No matter who makes your mobile device, it will have Volume Up and Volume Down buttons on the side. It will also have separate, software-based volume controls. But iOS and Android handle those controls in very different ways.
On an iPhone, you can adjust the ringer volume independently of other sounds by going to Settings > Sound and Haptics, and turning the Change With Buttons option off. Choose a volume for the ringer, and you’re done. In that configuration, you can silence the ringer with the switch just above the volume controls, but the Volume Up/Down buttons will affect only system sounds and apps.
Android, by contrast, has the option to allow different volume settings for calls, media, notifications, alarms, and ringtones. That’s especially useful on long road trips, where you can mute notification sounds so that they don’t interrupt the music you’re listening to.
Android offers independent controls over different types of sounds; iOS doesn’t.
That’s my list. If you’ve got a different set of annoyances or a workaround I missed here, please leave a comment.
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