[HereWeGo]

Originally Posted by Blah
Galaxy S4 is ok. But my S3 already does everything I need it to do, so don't see why I need to change it. Unless I break mine or give it away to a cousin I don't see myself upgrading. HTC One looks like a solid phone though, would have been better if their camera was better instead of pre-processing image they should have gone for a higher resolution.

As someone who have used every iphones in the market since the beginning and extensively used iPhone 5 (my brother uses it), I just can't see the appeal of iphone over a premium android phone other than "Oh look its an iphone".


To name some of the things that you can do with android phone but can't with iphone:

- Changing battery. Bad battery or during long off-the-grid journey doesn't mean dead phone or taking your phone to apple store, you just swipe your battery. Many people might not know this but lithium polymer based battery self-life starts to drop after 12 months, meaning your batter can hold charge for shorter period of time.

- Depending on the android phone, you can actually add a larger battery with custom casing, the battery fits inside the shell as opposed to outer body expensive battery chargers for iphone.

- Micro SD. With higher resolution camera and ever growing apps size (because of higher resolution displays) its a crime to not be able to increase your storage size. Its almost a scam to pay for a larger flash sized phone with premium price for more space. Built-in flash storage will almost always will be more expensive than micro-SD. Imagine your iphone is broken/died everything is lost. With MIcroSD, you can retrieve it (if you store everything there, which I do) and just pop it on another phone.

- How many of you actually do physical backup, which can take an insane amount of time if you have many files. Iphone5 proprietary cord (lightning connector) has a slower transfer rate than a usb3 cable which all android phone support/uses. Its easier faster to backup/transfer from an android phone than from an iphone.

- NFC tags. A god send for power-users. Basically you can program your phone to automatically do custom things, depending your location or where or how you place your phone without any manual input. To give an example, you can put an NFC tag by your bed side table, so when you go to bed and put your phone on the bedside table it will automatically (pre-programmed) non-distracting un-necessary items like turning off notification, turn on alarm etc etc. There are like a million way you can set it up, like in your car, in your office.

- App updated for the same app will almost always come to android app-store eco system than on iphone. because iphone has a very large set of restrictions on what kind of apps your can install, and what your apps can or can-not do. And not all of these restriction are security related, they are control related. So lets say tomorrow, they don't like the recent changes you made on your app (which is used by many) they can totally ban you from the app store and users can't install it on their iphone, without seriously breaking it (jailbreak is far from perfect and doesn't work on all versions). With android you can download the apk from the developer and side load it if google play store decides to block it (which happens but rare)

- Android OS is frequently updated, with large features added in every major changes.

- Skinning your android OS means every android doesn't have to look and work the same way. There are literally 100s of ways you skin customize the way your android looks. In an iphone world every phone looks and works exactly the same way, to top it off the OS pretty much looks the same since it was first released 5 years ago.

- Better notification center and no its not a question of having subjective taste/opinion. Its just better in every way.

- Wireless charging. While a little gimmicky feature. Its an example of individual android manufacturing adding features unique to their hardware, and differentiating them from others.

- True multi-tasking with Galaxy phones.

- For powerusers, rooting for android phone and using custom ROMs, for more options, choices and customizations. to give some examples; you can increase your processor clock speed or decrease it for even better battery life, use custom kernels, or even use it as a passive wireless sniffer to crack wifi passwords and all kind of crazy stuff...

On the other hand there are very few things an iphone can do that an android can't. I really can't think of any major feature, so feel free to help me out.

Here is another side of the story....

You should never do a comparison between an ecosystem with multiple phones with different features (Android) and an ecosystem with a single product (IOS).

However You can do a comparison between 2 Smart Phones, since the features you mentioned is a combined advantage of all android phones and no one will own multiple phones...

example
- Top of the line HTC One and Sony xperia sets are generally unibody so no way one can change the battery

- Microsoft has managed to design the OS to be very fast and efficient on single-core processors allowing the UI to be fast and smooth while assisting the GPU with games, graphics and some great multimedia work, same is true for IOS but Android being an open source is not the most efficient and hence needs faster processors for the same fluid experience.
This in turn increases the cost of production and decreases the battery life

- Physical backup is all well and good but in this era of cloud computing I really dont see think SD cards are as important as you are making it sound

- Using different skins and customizing has its advantages as well as disadvantages. It takes much longer for an average non technical user to adapt to an android set than IOS or windows phone.

- Wireless charging and NFC are both gimmicks with very little use at present. Nokia Lumia introduced wireless charging and the capability exist for an additional hardware on Apple and Blackberry products too.. However it takes an eternity to charge so this is just a gimmick. And I hardly see transactions using NFC ( never heard of one tbh). And sharing can be done with other modes also (bluetooth/wifi etc). And the touch sharing using NFC on samsung is only compatible with another samsung... So a gimmick

- Apple IOS apps are customised for Tablets and phones, Android apps are hardly customized. Hence while nexus tabs offer better resolution but most apps cannot take advantage of this feature.