Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Updated: "Why I switched from iPhone to Android"

Why I switched from iPhone to Android, article by Andy Ihnatko, "Internationally beloved tech columnist"

People whom I know, respect, and even consider to be friends have dismissed large phone screens as a cheap marketing gimmick that targets gullible consumers in the showroom, and which doesn't offer any practical benefits.
Yikes. That's so incorrect, so far out of whack with reality as I experience it every day with the Samsung Galaxy S III, and with other flagship Android phones, that I can't even mount an argument against it. I can't think of anything to say other than "Nope. Wrong."

He has several other points, and there are more articles in his series, but I just had to reiterate this point again. Like with the grey screen before the Kindle PaperWhite came out, it's just one of these things which burn my hinterland like Dubya.

Update:
Shockingly, Apple "Evangelist" number one, Guy Kawasaki, has also changed to Android.

But not everybody is in love with bigger phones, not MacWorld for example.

Me, I'm reading interestedly, because I really like a phablet, but I find it harder to buy the TV shows I want on Android, and the article software I use on iPad is so far much poorer on Android, in formatting and such. (Although some of it has text-to-speech, which is disappointingly hard to find on iOS.)

1 comment:

Stephen A said...

Similar experience

Frankly, for me low (contract free) cost, a sliding keyboard and a prepaid account are requirements for any phone I buy.

The flipside of "fragmentation" is diversity, Gates once wrote a memo suggesting cloning the Mac for much the same reason:

Any deficiencies in the IBM architecture are quickly eliminated by independent support. Hardware deficiencies are remedied in two ways:

-expansion cards made possible because of access to the bus (e.g. the high resolution Hercules graphics card for monochrome monitors)
-manufacture of differentiated compatibles (e.g. the Compaq portable, or the faster DeskPro).

The closed architecture prevents similar independent investment in the Macintosh. The IBM architecture, when compared to the Macintosh, probably has more than 100 times the engineering resources applied to it when investment of compatible manufacturers is included. The ratio becomes even greater when the manufacturers of expansion cards are included.


This is coupled with a greater profit with greater flexibility for component manufacturers.

Both approaches have their merits but it is definitely a case of Cathedral and Bazaar