Having now purchased the new Nexus 7, I can first-hand observe the oft-reported deficiency of the Android platform compared to iOS:
lack of high-quality apps.
That applies to such essential (for me) apps like Mailbox, Toodledo, or office software packages. A typical situation on Android seems to be, that even if you manage to find a particular app whose quality satisfies you in iOS, the same app in Android will be of lower quality. This is the case of the Kindle app, for example. It is also true of "office" apps: my favourite iOS office app, DocsToGo, which satisfies me nearly 100% in iOS, is so lame in Android that it even fails to support Dropbox or any other cloud services except for Google Drive. Kingston Office, while pretty impressive for a free Android app, does support various cloud services, but its actual interface (for example, when editing spreadsheets) is inferior to DocsToGo in iOS. Quickoffice always struck me as a low-quality app -- and its quality has now further decreased after being purchased by Google, and being given away for free now; instead of supporting all cloud services like it used to, it now likewise only supports Google Drive!
Naturally, where Android comes up short
most, from my point of view, is in failing to provide a top-quality counterpart for
Marvin. For this reason, I can only hope that
Marvin for Android will not remain a pipe-dream; that we will get to use it in (say) 2014.
Just to take a look at current leading Android e-readers, I briefly tested 4 of them: Moon+ Reader; Mantano Reader; FBReader; and Aldiko. See screenshots below (click them for full size) to compare how the same book displays in the 4 Android e-readers, and in Marvin (the final screenshot).
Here is a short summary of my findings:
- Moon+ Reader — to me, the best of the Android bunch, because most customisable, yet compared to Marvin, it seems woefully inadequate. Switching text/background colours is an arduous procedure. At least the paragraph spacing setting is there. There are quite a few reading fonts on the menu, but I wasn't impressed by any of them. And, there is no option for indenting the first line in paragraphs.
- Mantano Reader — offers only 3 colour modes (Normal, Sepia, Night), which, on a tablet capable of displaying millions of colours, is just as inexcusable as it is in the Kindle and iBooks apps. I found no option to select your preferred reading font (!). I found no paragraph spacing option, and no page margin settings, either.
- FBReader — unlike the other three, it offers textures as reading backgrounds: the grand total of 4 textures, that is. Again, no paragraph spacing setting.
- Aldiko — once more, no paragraph spacing setting, making everything on the screen blur into a single blob of text. Offers the nicest selection of reading fonts from among the four.
