Android versus iPhone

Cnet has a video about why android is better than iOS and iPhone.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/reasons-android-better-than-iphone/9742-1_53-50095696.html?tag=api

This review does help me lean that-a-way…. yet I’ve spent hours today on Amazon and elsewhere reviewing different Android incarnations, none yet with v2.2, and with a daunting number of exceptions. And all serious satisfied Android customers still give or take away “stars” based on the “iPhone platinium-iridium bar”. One of the Android plusses, is so many choices…yet is a curse as well, since rush to market almost guarantees poor or incomplete QA

Sadly neither the customers, much less the OEMs (Samsung, LG, Nokia), seem able to handle so many variations without a massive migraine of industrial ADHD.

• I’ve tried so many “top rated” phones, and each has had some glaring blunder[s] … no, actually.. “evil compromise” that they deliver with the phone.
• My iPhone2 chose to omit cut/paste, promised, did not deliver voice dial. I swapped it for now-obsolete Motorola Z60 that was great phone but inept browser, that *did* sync with Outlook with a lot of “handholding”
• Then my most carefully researched and most beautiful Nokia had everything, including a small system crash/shutdown when dialling. Yep, they took the “no body will use this” shortcut with the PHONE part of their smartPHONE.
  It was a hardware masterpiece but a software, customer-is-idiot shortcut-turned-nightmare
• Current reviews of Korean and Euro phones all have a near equal list of Pros and Cons.
• The shortlived Samsung Mythic had better design yet the apt choice of name (mythic and elusive)
  ( spotty voice dial is 1000% better than Nokia’s or Apple, but 60% of Motorola’s 5 year old technology)
• “What the market will bear” to me means “what we will buy ignorantly, then put up with sheepishly“

I’ve got some waxed string on order. But am flirting with Ericsson’s X10, a used iphone 3gs or 4, HTCs 8181
If I expect my next phone to last for 3+ years, I may have to wait 3+ years. And for twice the value of laptop?
Apple seems to be the Volvo to Android’s Detroit (Beijing?) Big 5.

• ** June, 2012 – Update: I’ve gone over to the BSD side with Iphone. Now family sits in front of silent 40″ TV playing individual games on barely 5″ iphones. Not Tempted am I – but jump happily like Pavlov’s dog when I hear the unique chime of Scrabble calling.
  – Abused by lesser, cheaper, half-smart, half-fast phones, makes me a silly happy convert to iPhone4. Android tries harder and may catch up, but now is a lap or so behind in polish and User Experience. Most web browsers, except iPhone’s, do allow file uploads.
  • No matter that voice dial just takes off and calls Brazil without confirmation.
  • Nor that the keyboard may or may not work horizontally, and “auto-mis-corrects” typed words to some really embarrassing choices. A textbook example of training the user to limp and like it.
  • Sadly alienated my Android friends, but now can hob nob with Apple apostles.
• Oh, indeed the iPhone is a beautiful, well thought out computer (PDA?), camera, GPS system ….
  … with a neat near-afterthought Phone Accessory, wonderful voice mail and WiFi video conferencing (FaceTime).
• When they discover a workable human input device, and file upload, then it may even replace the PC for 90% of office work…
• iPhone replaced 50% of my email work yet gotten many laughs when I miss mistakes that auto-correct introduces. Yes it can be turned off.
• It also has a fairly good Japanese IME with a spacebar that selects kanji, but can never enter spaces to accept a shorter / earlier choice.,

Lesson in Marketing 201 – Keep the consumers clamoring for just a few more features each new revision!