iPhone Vs Android

The last time I addressed this topic was seven years ago and although much has changed much is still the same. Many of my arguments then still hold today. However the market is so much more mature and there has been a lot of water under the bridge so what is the situation now.

Before 2007 there really was only one smartphone contender, that was Windows mobile. Sure there were Blackberry, Palm and Symbian but these were never going to become defacto standards. Post 2007 the market is pretty much between iOS and Android with the rest becoming foot-marks in the pages of history. So which is better and which one should you buy.

Fragmentation

This is where you have many versions all offering different features. At last count there were in excess of 10,000 different distinct Android models. Right now there are three Apple models, the 2005 iPhone 6S, 2016 iPhone 7 and the budget SE model. This fragmentation leads to real issues as we will see below. Every man and his dog are making Android phones so there is no consistency and often a lot of confusion about what you are really getting in a phone. Also many of these phones are of dubious quality. Most people realise this and so stick to the big three, Samsung, LG and Sony, but mostly Samsung. However fragmentation can lead to other issues so let's move on.

Cost

This is the biggest argument from people criticising Apple. Let us take a look at Samsung and Apple. The Samsung flagship model is the S8 which starts at about $1,200, whereas the Apple 7, the equivalent from the Apple stable is $1,269, not a huge difference. I will not list the specific specifications since they are pretty close in most respects. If you go through the range the price per equivalent model is pretty close across the range. Pricing is based on technology and specification, not on branding. To say that you pay a premium for the Apple brand is a common fallacy and not borne out by the facts. The one thing you can say is that you can get very cheap Android phones, however that is what you are buying. A cheap phone. In this day pf phone plans you can still get an iPhone SE at $0 on a two year plan. So cost is a fiction.

Features

Since there are so many more Android models there will be this or that model which has a unique or interesting feature. Wireless charging, OLED screen, edge display, rear display, or other feature which are novel but more or less useless.

I recall a discussion I had with an Android fan-boy who was telling me about how wonderful his "edge" display was. This is where the display folds over the edge of the display to show notifications and specially activated side menu features. After extolling its virtues he then told me he turned it off because it was annoying. In fact this is what I found most users do. So this expensive feature is pretty much unused on this model of phone.

This pretty much sums up the situation. Android include features which are often "nice" but pretty much unused. Apple tend to design features for their universal appeal and usability.

There is also the issue of high end features which are limited by the engineering. For instance there have been OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays around for a couple of years now. And as soon as Android phone became available with OLED Apple were criticised for not moving to OLED. The only problem is that OLED is extraordinarily difficult to produce, there is a high failure rate and no one is able to produce the display in quantities that would be required for an iPhone model. The new special edition phone is rumoured to have an OLED display but even that will be in short supply due to the difficulty in obtaining enough displays to meet production requirements.

That phone may have a better camera, this phone may have a better display but what Apple do is develop a phone with features and functions that people actually use and can be produced reliable and in quantity.

The other issue here is fragmentation. When you buy an iPhone you know that you will get every feature, GPS, Fingerprint reader, BT, gyroscope, Stereo sound, quality screen, you have no idea which hardware feature will be missing from your Android.

App Store

There has been much criticism of Apple over its policy of only allowing apps from its own App Store. This has swings and roundabouts. Android has an app store but so do some of the other manufacturers and there are also a number of third party app stores. However this has not stopped almost every app imaginable from appearing in the Apple App Store and I have never heard of anyone not being able to find the app of their dreams. This does not seem to have actually been an issue. Indeed many of the apps that enhanced the operating environment from third parties on jail broken devices have now made their way into the iOS environment.

Interestingly most Android phones are sold with the same restrictions as Apple but without the security management. The closed Apple environment means that you are a lot less likely to get spam apps, viruses, and exploits in your Apple apps.

Updates

The number of Android devices running the latest OS is significantly smaller than Apple. There are several reasons for this. First may Android phones cannot be updated since each manufacturer is responsible for providing updates for each of their phones and most of them do not bother.

Second if you buy a carrier branded phone on a plan then that carrier has to provide the update. This means that you cannot use the manufacturers update even if they provide one and carriers rarely if ever supply updates to their branded phones.

What this means is that you will not get the latest features, for that you need to buy a new phone. Neither will you get bug fixes or security fixes. You are stuck with what you bought.

All apple updates are available to all Apple phones that are compatible. Apple will eventually drop support for older phones but at the writing of this article all Apple phones up to five years old will receive the new iOS currently in development.

Carrier Bloatware

One of the things that Apple was firm about when first negotiating with carriers was that no carrier sold phone could have a customised OS. Up until then all carrier phones on a plan had the OS customised and branded with the carrier and came with additional carrier apps (bloatware) added to the OS that could not be removed.

Many Android phones come with a customised carrier OS and cannot be updated as I said above. In addition there a  bunch of carrier apps pre-installed which cannot be removed. This makes each of these phones less stable slower and not able to be updated. Not so with Apple. What you get with an iPhone is an unadulterated iOS installation.

Locked Into Apple

 Many people criticise Apple for locking you into its own ecosystem. Lightening connector, Apple Store and iTunes. All of this is true but it really is no more than the way you use the Apple iPhone rather than in any way being restricted. You can use whatever peripherals you want, you can use any app you want, it integrates an many ways to most devices so it really is a lot more flexible than many people give it credit for. It interfaces with BT and USB quite seamlessly and  if you do need an analogue output then the adaptor is only $12 from Apple and even cheaper on line, but you do get one in the box.

Conclusion

Regardless of all of this there will still be people who are just Apple haters, just because. There will be no pleasing them. I have met many and they somehow have an irrational dislike of anything Apple.

As for the rest there is absolutely no reason why you would not buy an iPhone. On every level it is a better ecosystem, more secure, no more expensive, and just as flexible. Apple set the standard for the modern smart phone and continues to do so.

Mr MC on the ATV4

Introduction
After setting up and using the ATV 4 for about a week I was searching for interesting apps. One of the disappointments was the facility of the two most popular streaming apps, VLC and Infuse. They both worked fine so far as they went but were somewhat limited andin the case of VLC not particularly user friendly.

A lot of people use Plex but apart from the way it wants to organise your media (not always correctly) it also wants to transcode everything before streaming it and it requires a Plex server separate from the media source and player. So what with the media management, transcoding and double handling resulting in doubling the network traffic I am not a real fan of plex.

The first media player I ever used was XBMC on the original XBOX. It has now been ported to many environments and diverse platforms, now including the ATV 4 and has a name change to Kodi. The problem is that you need a developer account, you need to side load it (that means buying a new USB C cable and connecting it to your Apple Mac and loading the binaries from there) and the installation expires after 90 days meaning that you have to re-load it every 90 days.

One of the principal developers of Kiodi for iOS has made his own branch minus a few features and called it Mr MC.

Installation and Setup
As with any app simply search the store and install. It was $10.99 in the Australian store.

I then went into the setup and changed a few settings. I change the Audio Output to 5.1 and turned bitstream on since my amp decodes all audio encoding formats.

I then had to add my media locations using SMB to the Audio, Video and Pictures section. As I added the audio share it asked if I wanted to catalogue my library and I answered yes. That allows it to sort by Artist Album, genre etc.

Apart from that it was ready to go.

Using
I understandably I found it identical to the modern ports of Kodi which I was already familiar with. A first time user would have a steeper learning curve but since I have been using XBMC for well over 10 years, of and on, it was very familiar to me. Apart from the lack of addons there was little difference that I could see.

I had no issues playing lossless music with excellent quality. It is possible to browse music using the file system browser but the music is also sorted by artist album and genre.

I tried various video media and it had few issues with any of the media formats I tried including DVD and Blue Ray rips I have up to and including 1080P, 60FPS DTS HD audio. On the larger files there was a slight amount of stuttering but I put that down to a network issue since I had to use a local USB drive on my Popcorn Hour to play the same media without stuttering. Where the audio needed decoding there was some distortion and have not been able to work out why. Where the audio was bit streamed the audio was flawless since it was decided by my AV receiver.

I found the Apple remote somewhat annoying to use with the MrMC interface but the Blue Tooth keyboard made it much easier to operate. I using the arrow, Enter and Esc keys made it much easier to navigate and the Enter, Esc, arrow and Space keys gave me good control when playing media.

Conclusion
The Mr MC app is so far the best media player I have tried on the ATV4 with no serious issues. The lack of addons I suspect is due to Apple's restrictions on Apps since Apple has no control over addons. Apart from that I think it is a definite winner for me and has now become my default player for local media.

Apple TV 4 Review

Introduction

I have been using the third gen ATV for several years now and have mixed feelings about it. The inbuilt apps work fine and do exactly want they say on the box however it is pretty inflexible and allows for very little customisation. . I mostly use it for iTunes vodcasts, music, YouTube, and Netflix. I also use it to Air Play from my iPhone 6+ for such apps as Spotify and ABC iPlayer. I rarely use much else but seldom does a day go by without using the ATV. The biggest thing for me is the limited facility of the inbuilt apps.

When the ATV 4 was announced and the Australian pricing I was determined to buy one despite the high price. Last week I bit the bullet and ordered one from Kogan which was about $50 cheaper than the Apple store price including freight.

The ATV 4 is capable of 1080P 60 FPS but not 4K or HDR. The next generation of hardware may support HDR but we will probably not know until it is announced. There are many theories as to why Apple chose not to support HDMI 2.0, 4K HDR. I suspect that it may have been because the standard was only fleshed out mid 2015 and there was insufficient time to design it into the hardware. Even so it was not until this year that the new standard was available in hardware. The other issue is the availability of content. There is still only a few 4K HDR titles and few displays capable of displaying the new standard. Just because a display is 4K does not mean that it will properly display the 4K HDR standard media.

Setup
On arrival and opening the box there was the ATV, a UK power cable (Kogan shipped the UK version), a lightening cable, the remote and some documentation. The localisation appears to consist only of the power cord and paperwork. Also in the packaging was a power adapter supplied by Kogan for the British plug so that it could be plugged into an Australian outlet.

I removed the old ATV and plugged in the HDMI, Network and power and turned it on. There was an option during setup to use a Blue Tooth to my iPhone to pull the setup from that to set up the Apple TV.  That did not work, which I suspect was due to a bug in the shipped OS 9.0. Otherwise the setup was pretty much straight forward.  I went into settings and manually added my credentials.

I tried to add a BT keyboard but it would not recognise it. 

I then went to the app store and downloaded my favorite apps including YouTube, Netflix and VLC but ABC iView would not install since it required TVOS 9.1 or later.

I performed a manual update to the latest OS and then went back and downloaded ABC iView.

After the update I was able to pair the BT keyboard so it appears that OS 9.0 has a issue with the BT stack.

In Use

The ATV is capable of HFR 60 Hz which means that it can properly deliver HFR video to the display. Playing a 60 FPS video media file appeared to be flawless. The video I streamed showed no artifacts but ... more later.

The app store is limited but have all of the usual suspects except for Spotify. I have contacted Spotify but they are tight lipped on the availability of an ATV app. I suspect that there is one in the works but no idea on the release date. In the mean time I am happy with Air Play which works perfectly fine. I downloaded Infuse media player which has a pro version but I have not yet taken the plunge to upgrade to Pro. I also investigated Kodi (XBMC) and there is a pre-alpha release for developers but it is pretty buggy according to the forums. I have to say that this has always been my favourite media player being completely open source and it has a lot of very good features. I have been using it off and on since it was available on the original XBOX and was the first media center I used.

The interface is fine if somewhat confusing. The home page and Apple apps insist on displaying a banner on the top third of the screen that scrolls through what they think you may want which steals from screen real estate and interferes with navigation. This is inherited from the old ATV and I find it distracting confusing and annoying. Would be nice to be able to turn it off.

The Sony TV I have has a bug in its HDMI negotiation whereby with 1080P 30 Hz the screen would initially appear blank and took some fiddling to fix each time the system turns on from cold. The new ATV also does this to my TV which is really annoying. To be fair it is the Sony TV, not the ATV.

I am really pleased with the ABC iPlayer app. It has the option to stream high def video (it appears to be 720p). You still see compression artifacts but not nearly as distracting as the lo-fi version we have been used to. It is almost as good as over-the-air quality. We have been watching iTunes Podcast versions of some ABC shows and they are utter rubbish with very low definition and obvious and distracting compression artifacts. So the new iPlayer is a huge winner for watching ABC shows.There are also apps for Seven, Ten and SBS streaming which vary in the quality of the streaming media but are fine if not Hi Def.

I used two streaming aps to stream video from my NAS. VLC and Infuse. Since my receiver includes the necessary decoders the player streamed the audio in  raw which appears to work up to and including DTS HD. Infuse did not seem to recognise a BD rip but played all of the other formats I tried including a 60FPS copy of The Hobbit TUJ. The one issue I have is that the necessary frame rate conversion for 24 FPS media leaves somewhat to be desired and resulted in distracting stutter. This is where the device (in this case the ATV) has to insert or remove frames in order to match the native frame rate of your display. So lets say for instance you have a 60Hz display and have a 24 frame source which is the most common combination. The frames are sent to the display multiple times to match the 60Hz of the display. Now a proper conversion will send an alternate stream of repeated 2 and 3 frames in order to match the frame rate. This will appear nice and smooth to the human eye. In the case of the ATV 4 they appear to send a bunch of frames 2 times and every few seconds it just skips a bunch of frames to catch up and hope that you do not notice. With static scenes this is fine but when you have on screen movement for instance moving characters or panning you suddenly see the scene jump. This has come up in forums and Apple are aware of it and don't appear to really care. My Popcorn Hour media device does this conversion seamlessly and without stutter but Apple have chosen the easy option it appears. This is independent of the media player. It seems only to happen to high definition media where there is a lot more processing required to perform the frame rate conversion.

I used VLC to try to watch a downloaded TV series. I selected Ep 7 and it started playing Ep 8 then about 5 minutes in skipped to Ep 9 for no apparent reason. This did not happen when I was playing movies. It seems to be a really strange bug. I went back to the PCH to watch that particular TV episode. Infuse appears to work flawlessly. We watched several transcoded videos and except for a reset in the middle of a video stream it worked without a hitch.

Referring specifically to the two streaming apps, VLC and Infuse I found them both relatively easy to use. One of the features I preferred with Infuse is the ability to create favourite shares. With VLC you had to start with navigating through the list of discovered network devices then navigate down through the media to your location which took many keystrokes. With Infuse though you create network favourites which enable you to choose from a list of locations with custom labels. This makes it much faster to locate the media file you want to stream. I created several shares to various locations on my NAS which made navigating pretty smooth. Infuse will also download artwork if available but it will not cache the artwork (which Kodi will do) so it downloads it every time you navigate to a location.

I am eagerly awaiting Kodi (XBMC) for ATV 4. I think that the Kodi interface has the best of every world and I may install the pre-release version. what is the worst that could happen :O.

As mentioned when the ATV 4 arrive it was on 9.0 TVOS which had a number of bugs including not being able to pair with BT devices other than the remote. It took about an hour to update. The update fixed the BT bug, added app groups as per the iPhone, improvements to Siri, and a number of other enhancements and fixes.

The new remote is interesting to say the least. It has a touch pad which is both a blessing and a curse. It means you can scroll easily using the touch pad  and it is designed to give you fine control over video playback. It also has the simplicity and de-clutter of the old remote. However the glass touch pad can be a bit sensitive and takes some getting used to. For those who lack dexterity I can see that it would be frustrating. It came with about a 75% charge but will change via lightening. You can see the amount of charge bu opening Settings and selecting Remotes. The battery will last weeks on a single charge so plugging it in over night about once a week should keep it charged.

The highest definition movie I tried was The Hobbit  at 60FPS 1080P. It was clear and smooth with no apparent artifacts. Short of a 4K movie it should be able to play anything you throw at it.

Conclusion

Overall I am really happy with the ATV 4. The minimal interface is easy to use and negotiate if you can ignore the top banner. With the latest OS the ability to create groups and customise the layout is very nice. The apps are a definite winner but some companies are somewhat behind the time in terms of app development. I am sure over time that we will get more apps and thus provide greater utility. Not being a gamer I cannot comment on games and there does not seem to be a lot of good games as yet.

The only big criticism for me is the stutter on high definition 24 FPS video. This is a huge mis-step on Apple's part IMHO. If they could fix that then It would be the perfect hi def set top box.