Galaxy S III and iPhone 4S comparison (Australia)

The two hottest selling phones on the market at the moment are the Galaxy S and the iPhone. Both Samsung and Apple are battling it out for customers and market share, along with a more behind the scenes legal battle with respect to patents.

Three weeks ago the Galaxy S III hit the shelves in the Australian market, and as my contract expired I was up for a new phone. I had bought outright the 4S on the day of it's release in Aus replace my damaged phone I had prior, and since a lot of similarities between both phones are found, people are wanting to know - whats better? There are numerous videos on the YouTube and many other sites compare the phone, so this is an Australian perspective.

Galaxy S III Home Screen

In short, both phones have lots of strong points that they both share. The battery life is great, photos and videos are excellent, and being both smart phones they have a whole host of apps available to them. I used my iPhone quite a fair bit and took it overseas, and used it as my digital camera. Saved me having to carry around two devices. Photo's I've taken with my Galaxy in the few short weeks I've had it have also been excellent.


The range of apps on the Apple app store is second to none. And it's proabably the biggest selling point for an iOS device for me. The sheer range of apps and amazing list of things they can all do is quite simply huge. I have yet to find an app that can't do what I'm wanting it to do. Android has a bit of catching up to do in this area, and may never catch up due to the strong developer and ease of use focus that Apple has for their system. That said, many of the popular apps are available on both phones and my personal ones, such as my banks app, flipboard, facebook, etc can be found on both, and usually there is an app which will do similar things on Android that Apple has, and vice versa.


The most obvious difference between the two phones/platforms is the way the "home" interface is used. In iOS, the home screen contains your apps, and app folders. In Android you have a home screen which has widgets and apps on it. Widgets include things like weather, clocks, play/pause buttons etc. Things you'd normally have to open an app for in iOS but can see in a dashboard style look on the one screen. Live wallpapers, such as one that interacts with the weather, and changes the backdrop accordingly are part of Android compared to Apple's picture only wallpaper.

iPhone 4S Home Screen

In terms of functionality, there are things that one phone can do that the other can't. Some of the stand out comparisons for me include the sync'ing of your iTunes playlists to your phone. Because the iPhone doubles as an iPod, you can put your music from your iTunes playlist, via a sync to your phone. Android doesn't have an iPod, rather it has a music player, which does the same thing, but doesn't have the sync functionality. But the voice feature (Siri) on the iPhone doesn't know anything about local restaurants, or driving directions in Australia, where as S Voice recognises you asked for directions, and will open up Google maps presenting you with a choice, which then loads the driving directions through GPS. S Voice is more or less a carbon copy of Siri, and I don't really use either that often. Both can send messages and schedule appointments for you, but after a while the novelty wears off, and I pretty much stopped using it a few weeks after getting my iPhone.


If you're looking for features like cloud sync - i.e. keeping your photos, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, tasks, email etc all together, in one place and accessible from pretty much anywhere, the good thing is that both phones do just that. Android has GMail, Google calendar, tasks etc, and Apple has iCloud. You simply sign in when you first use the phone and both are freely available. On Android, it's all set up for you as soon as you sign in, you just accept the conditions, and iPhone will take you through the step-by-step.


Both phones are pretty similar in terms of functionality, and ability. The main differences are the cosmetics of the phone, the screen size, the interface, and what the phone can do without needing to download any additional apps for the same level of functionality. i.e. the Galaxy S comes pre built with a video player that supports a huge range of codecs that allow all sorts of videos to be played, whereas you need an app (possibly one at additional cost) for that on iOS. The built in task app wasn't to my taste on the Galaxy S, so I downloaded another.

If you're in the market for a new phone, my suggestion is to look at the phones, go to your carrier's shop and ask for the demo models. Hold them, and have a look in the flesh and see what you think, then compare the prices and plans. Both phones are really excellent and offer plenty of functionality. I have been very impressed with both.

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How to stop the iPhone's screen rotating

Was asked yesterday about how to lock the iPhone's screen from rotating when you view it side on. I thought a few of you out there might find this useful, so here is a step by step guide to follow. It's really simple!

Start by double tapping the home button.

This will pop the screen up and show you your recently used applications. Once this appears, swipe your finger right, and it will show this screen:

This screen has a few options. You can play and pause your music, you can go to the iPod, or you can lock the screen, by clicking on the icon to the left.

Once you've clicked it, the icon will change to a padlock, as shown below:

If you press the home button once more, your screen will now be locked. And a little icon indicating this will appear in the top right hand side of the screen in what is sometimes referred to as the "tray", but next to the battery icon.

That's it - it's that simple. If you decide you'd like to turn rotation back on, you can do so at any time from any screen your on.

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Wrong Date/Time on Mac after shutdown?

Your computer's clock is set to a date before Jan 1, 2008. This may cause some applications to behave erratically.

This happened to me about 15 minutes ago after my laptop ran out of battery last night whilst I was using my computer, and the power cut out.

The error on the screen looked like this:

When I clicked on to my time in the top right hand corner of the screen, I noticed that the clock's time had returned to normal.

However, this can cause problems for you if it's not automatically set back, so here's how you can fix it.

Click the system preferences icon in the dock, as shown below, or click the Apple Icon at the top left hand corner of the screen, and choose system preferences from the drop-down box.

In the system preferences pane, choose Date & Time, then tick the box to automatically update if it isn't already, and that should connect to the Apple servers to update the time.

That said, you can always leave it un-ticked, and set the time manually yourself if you like, and that will resolve the problem.

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A complete idiots guide to twitter

Twitter is another type of social networking you've no doubt heard of, but if you're like many that haven't even looked at it, or ever understood what it's for, you've come to the right place!

In short, twitter is a service that allows you to share what your up to, whats on your mind, what's new, what's going on, what's trending etc. There is a limit to how much you can write with a limitation of 140 characters per tweet.

There are different types of users too. Some are companies, most are individuals, some are blogs, some are news sites, others are spam. You get all sorts on twitter.

Apart from "tweeting" what you're up to, or whatever your tweet is, you can also "follow" people. This principle is similar to the friend feature on facebook, except that most people don't have their profile on private, in fact by default your account is public, which means anyone can follow you and get your updates.

Many people don't even use twitter to post anything, rather they just use it to follow others (myself included) to get their updates and find out whats happening. The way I use twitter is to get news updates from specific companies that I have an interest in. For example, you can follow Microsoft, Google, Apple, your bank, your phone carrier, your friends, your local news publisher, and so on. In this way you essentially get a customised news feed which gives you updates and news on places, companies and people you care about.

Personally, I think this is the best thing about twitter, and this is the primary reason I use it.

Let's get into a few guides on how to use and interact with twitter.

Firstly, you'll have to get an account. When you navigate to twitter.com for the first time, you'll get a login screen, and a prompt to sign up for a new account. It will look similar to this:

In order to sign up, just enter your details in the box that says "New to Twitter?" then click the yellow button below.

The next screen will confirm your details and ask you to create a username. This username will appear all over twitter whenever you make tweets or when people refer to you in a tweet. This can be changed later if you need to. It looks a little like this.

Finally, you click create my account. You will then be presented with a quick set-up which will help you find your friends on twitter, help you locate potential people/companies/etc to follow

Towards the end of the set-up guide, the service will ask you for a short Bio about yourself, with a limitation of 160 characters, and the option to upload a profile picture. None of any of this information is required, however I'd recommend putting at least something in. Even if it is very basic information. Eg. "My hobby is stamps", or something.

This is the final step to the set-up guide of creating a twitter account on the twitter website. The next screen you'll see is the main screen. This will change over time as you start to follow more and more people. But it might look like this when you first start. You may also be asked to confirm your email address with twitter.

On the left hand side of the screen, you can see worldwide trends, which you can customise to be your location, by clicking change.

Above this box is your profile box, where you can create a new tweet, see how many people you follow, how many follow you, and how many tweet's you've made since creating your account.

The last piece of info I'll go into in this guide is the hashtag section. A hashtag is a tag you can add to your tweets when you are tweeting about something that is relevant to an event, time, news or something happening. For example, looking at the list of trending topics posted in the screenshot, Titatic is a topic which is getting a lot of attention on twitter at the moment. If you were to write a tweet about the Titanic movie, you could include a Titanic hashtag in your tweet. An example tweet could be: "Going to see a ship destroyed by an iceberg in 3D. Should be awesome. #Titanic" In this way, you are referring to the titanic, but not actually including it in your sentence. It's a good way to add topics to your tweet, whilst reducing the word count, and keeping up with current trends.

That's it. With all this info at hand you should have a basic idea about twitter, how it works, and how to use it. If you have any questions, please feel free to post in the comments below, and I'll do my best to answer you.

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