Hi Owen, Glad to help. Short answer: Buy an iPhone.
Longer answer: When people ask me what phone to buy, I ask one simple question: Are you married to iTunes? Do you have a playlist for every mood? Have you spent years getting it to work just right? If so, buy an iPhone. You will be massively unhappy otherwise. To a lesser extent, if you are married to the Apple ecosystem -- iCal and such -- this also applies. Modern smartphones are becoming the sharp point of your digital life; one that doesn't fit will drive you mad. If you are not married to the Apple ecosystem, then try out a few phones side by side and see what you like. Frankly, they are all "good enough." I find the current real differentiator to be the screens. Here, Android has the lead, and it is widening. (Sorry for the pun!) State of the art here is the new -- and for the moment, insane appearing -- Galaxy Nexus Prime, with a full HD 720 screen -- !! -- that's just over 4.6 inches. What appears to be happening here, btb, is that Apple is betting heavily on larger tablets, and Google is trying to find out if a phone can have a screen big enough -- while the device remains small enough -- that you don't want a tablet. So, specific advice. It sounds like you are in the Apple eco-system. If so, buy an iPhone. If your 2 is dead dead, buy a 4s; its a very nice device. If your 2 can be coaxed through another year, wait for the iPhone 5. Rumor has it that this will be the last Jobs designed phone, and that it will finally have a bigger screen. If you are not married into the Apple eco-system, I would definitely give the dual core Android phones a look. My advice is to focus on either the HTC phones, or the Google Nexus line. The Nexus line are "Google Experience" phones; they get every Android release first. HTC is also good about this, and makes solid equipment. Take a look at the Sensation if for nothing else than the manufacturing: instead of a battery cover, the entire back is a single milled piece -- aluminum, IIRC -- that pops off the screen. You could drive nails with the thing, and its beautiful. (To be clear, Do Not Drive Nails With Your Phone.) Carriers: Verizon-Stupid expensive. Good service and coverage. ATT-Stupid expensive. Bad service and coverage Sprint-They suck so bad we won't use them T-Mobile-Great plans! We have multi-line T-Mobile plans that cost less than single lines on ATT and Verizon. Good data tiers. Great Android phone selection. Pretty easy to get the phones unlocked to swap out SIMs for international roaming. Alas, no iPhone. Hope I haven't overexplained as usual... cjf ________________________________ From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [friam-boun...@redfish.com] on behalf of Owen Densmore [o...@backspaces.net] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 7:18 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [SUSPICIOUS EMAIL] Re: Android Choice Please keep firing questions as you think of them! God, what an offer! Thanks! History: I bought the initial iPhone 2G, first by trying ATT, which failed due to lack of coverage (and poor service reports) so I bought one on-line and use pwnage tool to jailbreak/unlock for TMo and european travel. It just died (after 4 years!). I rather like the iDevice ecology, having macbooks, macmini, ipad, ipod etc, and have an app that is not yet on android but has a poor replacement on android. I like that the apps span ipad/pod/phone too. I'm not a power user, but use phone, web, mail, music, apps, maps, angry birds, ... at least once a day, no more than an hour, I'd say. I like TMo quite a bit, but am willing to try Vzn, less so ATT .. they still have poor coverage where I live (Santa Fe). I find that the plans my friends have are impossibly expensive, > $90/mo, .. while I pay $58/mo. There are some interesting alternatives such as buy unlocked and use prepaid plans, but this mainly makes sense on GSM, which here means TMo. Even with Vzn, I would prefer a "world phone", thus GSM (Italy 1-2 months/yr). Main negative for TMo is AWS rather than the more standard 3G etc, and would eliminate iPhone unless Edge was good enough, which I haven't found to be the case. I've looked at a lot of alternatives: MVNOs, WiFi "carriers", prepaid, Senior plans (I'm 69) and even cheaper phones + iPod. If I had my choice, I'd buy an unlocked iPhone, 4 or 4s, and use it on ... hmm, ATT, no, lousy coverage, TMo, no, uses non-compatible broadband. Well what's left? 1 - See if the Vzn iPhone 4s is OK, get the european SIM unlock, and see if I can avoid $90/mo bills. 2 - Suck it up, embrace android, and go with TMo. They seem to have OK phones. They have brilliant plans, both contract and pre-payed. And are way less than $90/mo. They've saved my skin more than once with problems traveling. 3 - Buy a prepaid GoPhone ATT SIM and try it on unlocked phone to see if coverage has improved. Then try ATT + iPhone and see if I can avoid $90/mo bills. I also prefer their more standard broadband, but not a big deal. That sounds like Pogue's great "I Want An IPhone" video, but I really am open to change. The difficulty is the "gotchas": plans that are really expensive, having duplicate apps for android and iOS (pad/pod/phone), phones that I don't trust (yet), mobility (I really find it hard to understand folks leaving europe out of their plans, but then...), batteries that die if I forget to turn off x,y,z and kill app a,b,c ... and billions of cellular issues that I don't really understand as well as I'd like (TMo about to die? Why do plans cost so much?, WTF w/ AWS?) So that's it! And I really thank you for your clear explanation of some of the android world that I didn't "get". -- Owen On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Chris Feola <ch...@nextpression.com<mailto:ch...@nextpression.com>> wrote: Hi Owen, Yes, Android phones are open. There are two paths for this: 1. Download updates yourself. Lots of places to do this, the best of which is generally regarded to be CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ 2. Wait for your manufacturer to stream you updates. Plenty of good reasons to do both. The best manufacturers -- I like HTC -- are consistently tweaking and adding features. CyanogenMod tends to be faster to the big updates. Use what you like. There has been some controversy about locked bootloaders, but everyone has pretty much backed off of that now. As to battery life, I'm sorry if I was unclear. The Sensation is as good or better for battery life when you use it the same way. But you won't. If you keep that quarterHD screen lit for four hours non-stop reading Heinlein on your Kindle app while streaming Pandora...yeah, you're going to need to recharge. If you only flick the screen on when you hear a text come in, not so much. Please keep firing questions as you think of them! cjf
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