Tried Android again and was burned again

[OpStar]

I dunno why anyone would want to be trapped in the iOS BS. I hate Apple with a passion.

[Nabby]

I dunno why anyone would want to be trapped in the iOS BS. I hate Apple with a passion.

Don't hate.. Participate!

Seriously though each camp has its benefits. I'm on an iPhone 5 now and it does what I need. The Nexus experience was nice and the new Nexus 4 is a promising device, but the tight ecosystem integration with the phone and my Apple TV is relly convenient. I still have my Nexus 7 tablet which is awesome, I considered swapping it out for a iPad mini but will likely hold out for a Windows Surface. Had the opportunity to play with one in the store today and it was really nice experience. I still do not like Windows 8's new interface for desktop but on a tablet it makes a lot more sense.

Will wait for holiday sales to see if I get a surface this year or not.

For the record by biggest gripe on IOS is the inability to change out my keyboard. If I could get swiftkey on my iPhone 5 I would be the happiest camper alive. Voice dictation in my car is still 100 times better with IOS then it ever was with Android, even with Android 4.1 on my Galaxy Nexus.

[LiquidCrash]

I dunno why anyone would want to be trapped in the iOS BS. I hate Apple with a passion.

Oh, a fanboy. I'll take your opinions with a grain of salt.

When Google makes bigger leaps, I'll switch. Pointless to do it now and have to repurchase my library of apps.

[OpStar]

It's not that I'm a fanboy it's just that I don't believe in how Apple does things. I also don't like how completely locked down their OS is or how everything they do is a designed money grab. At least Android is open and uses industry standards like micro usb. Apple is a terrible example for a technology company to follow.

[ImaNihilist]

It's not that I'm a fanboy it's just that I don't believe in how Apple does things. I also don't like how completely locked down their OS is or how everything they do is a designed money grab. At least Android is open and uses industry standards like micro usb. Apple is a terrible example for a technology company to follow.

Apple is the example that every technology company is trying to follow. Not just hardware either.

Back in the 90s there was this idea that open standards might actually win. Things like USB came into being. The Internet was born, and there was this fully decentralized network. Some 15 years later, we are actually back where we started before the Internet where a handful of players are trying to control entire verticals. In the consumer space you've got Microsoft, Apple, Samsung/Google and Amazon. Each one has created their own platform, and each one is pretty much fully locked down. Android appears "open", but it's really not. The Google Play Store is the only real store. The Dalvik VM is not the same as the standard Java VM. Google took the Java and said, "We're doing are own thing, we don't care about the standard Java." Then Amazon came along and took Android and said, "We're doing our own thing. We don't care about the standard Android." If everyone starts their own standard, and none of them are interoperable, then they aren't standards.

We tried standards. They didn't work. For the better part of a decade the only "standard" was whatever Microsoft decided, and software was quite stagnant.

And we've got the same kind of closed structure on the Internet side of things. More and more of the Internet is controlled by Google, Amazon, Rackspace and potentially Microsoft's Azure. 10 years ago there really was no single point of failure on the Internet. Today, when a Google, Amazon or Rackspace datacenter goes down for a few hours large parts of the Internet grind to a halt.

The reality is, people are willing to give up control if it means a better overall experience. Trying to pretend like that isn't what's going on is kind of silly. No one cares about hardware specs or interoperability anymore. You can't buy into Google's ecosystem and then pretend like you care about openness just because they open source certain things. Most of Mac OS (and iOS, to some degree) are open source as well. That doesn't mean anything unless you are a software engineer. Your applications and media aren't any more portable with Android than they are with iOS or WP8. If anything, iOS may be the most interoperable by virtue of being the biggest. That is, I can watch my Amazon content on my iPad. I can't watch my iTunes content on my Kindle. Google Drive works my iPhone. iCloud doesn't work on my Nexus.

[James]

I'll buy a Nexus 4 simply because it's a bleeding edge smartphone for $349... UNLOCKED

[ImaNihilist]

I just got an iPhone 5 yesterday. The 64GB model. $850 (with AppleCare+)
I should be able to get $500 for my 4S, so not too bad.

Gotta say though, I'm pretty disappointed. It's insanely fast, sleek, thin and light…but the shape and aspect ratio are just wrong. Why in the hell are we using 16:9/10 in handheld devices? It's freaking terrible. It's awkward in your hand. If you hold across the bottom, you have to stretch to get your thumb to the upper corner.

Are there any other handhelds that are 3:2 that I don't know about? Everything seems to be 16:9/10. How am I the only one bothered by this? I have pretty average size hands…I think. What the hell do people with smaller hands do? How are 4.5" screen devices even selling? Who has hands large enough to use those with one hand?

I'm hoping they actually DO create an iPhone mini and bring back 3:2. 16:9 looks great when watching video, but it's absolutely terrible for everything else on a handheld. I'm tempted to go back to my 4S, but the LTE speed is pretty nice.

[Steven P Jobs]

I'm currently using a 4" 16:9 Android device and it's definitely the upper limit of what I would deem comfortably usable. I think a large part of the reason why phones are getting bigger isn't that people want bigger phones, but that they want thinner phones and making the thing bigger is the only way to fit a large enough battery.

[LiquidCrash]

Yeah, 4/4s is perfect size for me, especially since I use it for GPS enabled fitness apps. 4.7/4.8in phones seem like they'd be a little bulky on my arm, and I won't even comment on the Note (although I know the size is meant more for productivity and note taking).