Having personally used an iPhone 4, Blackberry Pearl( clearly not the current OS), and a Samsung Galaxy S4(current phone), I can firmly say that I much prefer using an iPhone.
The Blackberry and Windows phones have basically next no apps compared to Android or iPhone which severely limits its functionality, its use to me, which is why I don't even bother with them.
Lets talk about Samsung. My Samsung phone is a piece of junk. Why? Well in no particular order I will list what problems I have with it. It's camera quality sucks in anything other than broad daylight. The camera takes pictures so slowly, that I find it very difficult to take a single clear picture whatsoever because my hands shake and aren't the most steady.
The phone has some pretty good specs, quad core snap dragon CPU, decent amount of memory, which all amounts to nothing because the phone comes so loaded with bloatware that the phone is starving for resources from the moment you turn on the phone. You might say "well why not just root the phone?". Yes. I did that, twice actually. I took the time to root the phone, install another OS on it, painstakingly remove the 100 or so Samsung bloatware programs that were sucking my phone's resources dry, only to have my carrier issue an update, for which you had no option to turn off, which when installed, brought all the bloatware right back again. With an iPhone, none of this bs is required and the phone just runs quick out of the box.
With any smartphone, I will inevitably use it to view porn at some point or another. Porn sites are the greatest source of malware and viruses on the internet. With a Samsung phone, well you have to be constantly clearing out the phone and even then, because Android, like Windows OS is so vulnerable to all this s**t, you end up having to wipe your phone and start from scratch. This would be nice if Google automatic backup actually worked and saved all your contacts and s**t, but in reality it doesn't. When trying to backup my phone I will often just get some bs error message about how it failed to back the phone up, or when I restore my phone, half my contacts are missing. Constant errors messages constantly plague any Android device, while my Apple devices maybe have 5-10% of the frequency of error messages that my Android device has.
Another feature which Android users are so keen to rave about is the expandable memory. Sure my phone came with 16GB, which for either Android or iPhone is a disk size that very quickly fills up. I bought a class 10 micro SD card 32GB (the fastest card available for my phone), and tried to load my mere 4000 songs onto it. When I connected the phone to my desktop via the inferior USB 2.0 connection, to merely open the folder, the phone crashed. The micro SD card when combined with the USB 2.0 makes it so slow that it is completely unusable. Sure I could rip the card out each time and put it in my media card reader which my computer just happens to have (rare these days), but that is a pain in the ass.
As far as I am aware of, no Android OS uses the card as just an extension of the diskspace on the flash memory in your phone. Most apps will not install directly to the card, you must manually move each one there, some will not even function on your card. In other words, just a pain in the ass, and much better to simply have a larger flash memory built into the phone to begin with.
As for the OS itself, (which I have had 3 different Android versions on this phone alone), they all constantly crash. The phone about 1 out of every 20 times simply will crash altogether when you try and unlock the screen to use it. Since Android has a billion different models, read the comment section of nearly ANY app and you will find that whatever app it is, doesn't work properly on someone's phone because no app is optimized for any one phone nor screen size. While I do not mind whatsoever having to troubleshoot on a Windows Desktop when I have a keyboard, mouse, 27" monitor and am sitting at home, I do NOT want to have to constantly troubleshoot a mobile device while I am out and all I have to work with is this tiny piece of s**t screen and no mouse and just an onscreen keyboard, that drives me up the walls. I just want my device to work, and in this area, iPhones, iPads just f*****g work. I am okay at losing some customization functionality on my mobile device if it means that the device will just work, won't have to deal with viruses and won't have to troubleshoot on the thing.
You might also say to yourself, "well my Android phone has better specifications than such and such iPhone". One thing I have learned is that Apple's OS (at least iOS because I don't use Apple desktops) is much better optimized and can run faster than an Android phone with much higher specs than it. It is sorta like AMD processors and Intel. AMD can have a bagillion cores more than whatever Intel processor has, but the Intel processor can still be way faster. This better optimization also results in less battery drain so that you don't necessarily need a larger battery in an iPhone, although it would be nice to be able to swap out the battery in an iPhone. When you make removable batteries, for some reason the rule seems to be that the case has to be a flimsy piece of plastic crap. I would rather not have my phone have the structural strength of a dixie cup.
Now we get to the Apple's iOS, it just f*****g works. Well again, in no particular order, we can start with the app store. There are more apps on this store than Android and the quality of the apps I find is better, they are better optimized to work with whatever Apple device I have, and I don't have to worry about the app itself being a piece of spyware, malware virus bs because every single app in the Apple store is screened for such. Because it is so easy to download and install paid apps for free on Android devices, and to do the same on Apple devices requires you to at least jailbreak the devices, there is more money to be made for app developers on iOS. This is reflected in the higher number and higher quality of apps on iOS despite both having very large customer bases. The reason Windows and Blackberry simply fail flat outright is that they have such a pathetic market share, that there is no financial reason why app developers would bother to make apps at all on these two OS's because the same effort to make an app on Android or iOS allows them to reach way more customers.
The camera on the iPhone 4 I remember not being a piece of crap even at 8MP, and the pictures even then were decent in a much wider variety of lighting, let alone improvements made on future Apple devices. Any features that I did like on the S4, such as the ability to take snap a series of pictures with a single click, I'm sure is a feature either Apple will steal if it hasn't already.
When it comes to accessories and cases, since there are very few Apple models of phones, stores can actually STOCK them. Unlike Android where there are a billion different shapes and sizes, that no store is ever going to bother to stock in the rare chance that someone with that Android model comes into their store and wants to buy something. This is also results in more accessories and devices being created in general for Apple devices than Android, let alone Windows or Blackberry devices, which further expands on the functionality of the phone.
While the lightning port on the iPhones is still USB 2.0, at least the end which you insert into the phone cannot be inserted wrong, which definitely helps when plugging a phone in in the dark. The USB 2.0 micro SD port is severely limited in its maximum power output rating which makes it take a lot longer to charge the same device with a lightning port used by Apple. Also because Apple does not have expandable memory, you can actually read any large folders that is on stored on your phone without it crashing like a piece of crap Samsung phone.
Lastly, there is resale value. At some point which you will reach with whatever phone you have, you will want to get a new phone. iPhone's have incredibly high resale value, more so than almost any electronic that I know of. Android phones? No there luck there, they depreciate almost at the same rate as a stock market crash.
My thoughts on these devices, while most appear as a disorganized mess in this post, explain why my next phone is not going to be a Samsung and why I am just going back to an iPhone.
19 Aug 2015, 5:29 am
