iPhone 4 vs. the Droid

[BailOut]

IMHO iTunes is the worst software to hit the Windows world since AOL 5.5. The minute you install it your system will bog down some and it never, ever lets up. Messed up file associations, slow running, huge resource footprint, poor disk layout, etc. all combine to make it a nightmare to work with, especially when something goes wrong, and let's face it - in the Windows world something *always* goes wrong.

So, I feel that the argument that the iPhone is a sleeker experience only pertains to the phone itself. Any time you have to sync or restore it (which you will have to do sooner or later) that changes. I agree that Android phones take more work than a vanilla iPhone but that work is limited to the phone itself; there's no resource intensive, craptastic software on the back end to contend with.

With all that said I am an iPhone user, but only because it came out before the Android phones did and once jailbroken allows me to perform my job remotely, and because my employer pays for it. I got a G1 for my wife a while back and it is a wonderful device, though T-Mobile totally left it hanging with no Android OS updates and she won't let me hack it to update it.

My job is drawing to a close and my employer will either ask for this phone back or will terminate my service soon. If I still can't unlock the 4.1 iOS at that time (it's not possible today unless you captured some firmware objects from a previous version, which I failed to do) then I'll be in the Android world. I would love to get a true Linux phone from Nokia but none are available from them today due to their jacked up, often delayed and midstream switch from the Maemo to MeeGo operating systems.


P.S. As you can glean from this post the smart phone world is an absolute mess today. You have iTunes, often spotty AT&T service, poorly implemented multitasking and antenna issues to deal with in the iPhone world, wildly disparate interfaces, user experiences and OS updates from Android vendors, the Linux models floating in limbo, Blackberry frantically playing catch up and finding itself trapped in its own hard-to-develop-for world and cheap, limited-functionality knockoffs all over the place. No matter which phone or service you choose the honeymoon will soon be over, and unless you often utilize the ability to have the Internet and GPS at your fingertips 24/7 you will soon find yourself in the unhappy place of paying way more for phone service than you should. If all you want is a keyboard for texting and a camera for on-the-fly shots there are plenty of non-smart phones out there that offer this functionality at much lower pricing. Food for thought.