tl;dr: get an iPhone if you’re the kind of person who likes to read blogs about how every company not named Apple is just the worst ever.
and i guess that is a side effect of having a lot of choice of hardware.
if there was only one android phone, it would be up to date too :)
Gaps: Multitasking and notifications were the most egregiously awful things about iOS, the things that were not only worse than Android and webOS, but worse than Windows Mobile 5. Multitasking was fixed in iOS 4. Notifications were fixed in iOS 5. Gaps closed.
iTunes/Mobile Me: Many, many people used iTunes before getting an iPhone, mostly for iPod purposes, but also for videos ‘n’ stuff. A person who had an iPod, had all their music on iTunes, had an Apple TV and had bought a bunch of iTunes videos, is a person who probably shouldn’t bother looking at an Android phone, unless they have some other reason to.
But if you like games (just to stay with mkozlows example) then the large number of games on the platform - many free - simply beats whatever you can get in an Amazon daily deal. There’s simply more quality apps for iPhone. And that’s likely to continue.
There are more games for iOS than Android, yes. But I think the gap is diminishing over time; and certainly Android has a zillion games, such that anyone who’s not buying it solely as a gaming device is likely to be satisfied. The main area where iOS seems to be way ahead of Android that way is with board game adaptations, where it has a lot more than Android.
I don’t expect that to continue – I expect that as Android’s popularity continues to rise, most game-makers are going to start using cross-platform middleware, and that platform-specific games are going to be a historical artifact, like making a game for the 360 and not the PS3.
Yeah that chart’s brilliant: Android clearly sucks because cheaper phones that were never designed to compete with the iPhone haven’t gotten OS updates. Also the original iPhone has, which is totally relevant because SlyFrog is probably considering buying one to replace his 3GS.
The droid incredible and evo 4g weren’t intended to compete with the iphone? All the other phones initially priced at $200 weren’t intended to compete with the iphone? At the exact same price?
The one thing that chart makes very clear is that you’d have to be crazy to buy anything except the android nexus flagship phones. And even there, the nexus one is losing support after under two years.
Look more closely at the colors of the bars for those phones.
Edit: additionally, it’s pretty stupid in general to look at just the period during which a phone continues to receive OS updates, rather than the actual features the phone has access to via those updates, but that’s beside the point; the Android phones released to compete with the iPhone do get the updates.
The thing I hate about these discussions is when people start belittling others who don’t make the same choices. I’m not crazy for liking my Android phone, and you’re not crazy or “drinking the kool aid” for liking your iphone. There are many completely valid reasons for wanting the different phones, it’s all about what works best for the person.
They weren’t completely abandoned (yet, anyway), but they were a full six months behind the current software at various points.
And of course lots of the other $200 phones were pretty much abandoned. The Cliq, droid, Behold 2, mytouch 3g slide, and garminphone all cost $200. The first droid was a huge release with tons of advertisements etc and it was only updated for a year.
I agree that this is pathetic, and fully blame the idiot manufacturers, who are all so determined to crap up their phones with customizations that they are unable to easily port new releases.
The Nexus One/ICS thing, though, I think is a hardware limitation thing – I think that the N1 is just slow enough that it wouldn’t run ICS well. And if you think that’s not a factor in the iOS world, well, every person I know who had a 3G and upgraded to iOS 4 griped so badly about the speed that they either downgraded the OS or bought an iPhone 4 within the month. I’ve seen the same thing with 3GS users and iOS 5, although I’m not sure it’s as universal.
At any rate – and here’s where the tinkering thing does come in – if you’re comfortable doing some tinkering, you can extend your phone’s lifetime long past its original support. I don’t think HTC will ever release ICS for my Evo 3D. I feel confident that I’ll be able to run it all the same. That’s one of the things I love about open source (and one that I freely admit is a geek-only thing of no interest to the general public).
Guys, can we not let this degrade into ANOTHER debate? Sheesh. Give Sly the facts, let him do the research and try the phones. We all wanna defend our platforms of choice, but will that really help here?
Not at all. I’m not an apple fanboy. I don’t have an ipad or a mac. I just think the iphone is a markedly superior device, and it’s certainly better supported and updated than the alternatives-- even if you buy a “nexus” android.
I normally stay away from these types of discussions, but that chart is stupidly misleading. What does “possibly still being updated” mean? That he doesn’t know? Why include it on the chart then?
Dude, look at the thread title. This isn’t some “recommend a GPS system” thread that’s being sidetracked, this is explicitly an “iPhone vs. Android” thread.
If it helps you understand, try clicking around the rest of that site. It appears to be a blog about how every company not named Apple is just the worst.
Yeah, for his personal phone, not to discuss the wider “my phone is better than your phone” crap. Android might be best for him, so might the iPhone, all we can do is help him with the facts, rather than argue over it.
Stop taking it so personally. Calm down. It’s just a phone.
That said, I don’t see how android could be better for anybody. Unless you happen to find the hardware significantly cheaper or you really enjoy extensively customizing through the OS. I guess piracy is a lot easier too, since apple keeps blocking jailbreaks. And its integration with google voice is really great. OK, so there are reasons. Just not enough for me.
Here’s the facts: Android has a lot more variety to choose from, including a whole bunch of features that iOS lacks that you may or may not find useful (Google navigation, third-party app stores, 4g, larger screens, hardware keyboards, etc). If you’d like to have any of those features, get an Android phone.
If, on the other hand, the iPhone 4S does exactly everything you want and you prefer the interface to that of Android, get that.
See my above post for details, but there are tons of advantages to Android that have nothing to do with customizing the OS or any other sort of “tinkering.”
People gave him directed advice early in the thread, but of course what happens is that people disagree with others’ advice. Stusser is being insane, for instance.
Really, unless you’ve got some super-specific criteria (“I need to monitor my glucose levels with my phone, what do you recommend?”), asking for a recommendation on a hotly debated topic is going to get you, shockingly, a debate for an answer.
I’m just going to point out that a phone’s software significantly changing while you own it is still a fairly new phenomenon, AFAIK.
Also, this notion that “not the latest and greatest” = “sucks now” is the worst sort of fashion-whore mentality. Do I hope that my phone gets the latest Android update? Of course. But if it doesn’t get it, it’s still a good phone.