I've been lurking this forum a lot lately. I am ready to ditch the iphone and move over to Android and I think this is the phone that will make me do it. Just tired of paying so much at AT&T and being locked into the stupid apple ecosystem. I need a change.
Amen... I've had the option of using a friend's old iphone for a while but I just can't stand them. It reminds me of when people still used AOL and I'd ask them why, and they'd always say two things:
"I can go to sites that you can't!" (Yeah, the AOL ghetto of a few hundred useless, ugly corporate advertisements. MTV@AOL! AWESUM!!!)
"It's just so much easier!" Yeah, because Yahoo! was so freakin' complicated. How you define "having to take extra steps to escape into the REAL internet" as "easier" is waaaay beyond me.
And now we have the iPhone. My dad brags about how simple (read:crippled) it is, and I don't see why, because we've both been pretty well-versed in computers ever since he brought home a Tandy 1000 about 20 years ago. But he's a lawyer and I studied computer engineering, so I guess we've diverged a bit (he also bought an iPad) as far as what we want our computers, mobile or otherwise, to be capable of.
His other favorite thing? You guessed it, the gimmicky apps like "Shake it". See, it shows you random attractions, but instead of giving you a list it shows them one at a time and you have to shake the phone each time. Wheeee! And, of course, there's a bunch of Popcap games that have been around forever, and a bunch of accelerometer games that were a lot more fun when they were first done on the Wii, in games like Warioware and Rayman Raving Rabbids.
The good apps, like Shazam, have already been ported. The really good ones, like Google Maps, are 10 times better on Android. The rest are a bunch of mediocre games and fart noise generators. He can afford to spend money on that stuff, but I don't see why he does... it's just a conspicuous consumption device.
The Dinc has gotten me excited about writing some code for the first time since I graduated from college. I can't wait. I will never own an iPhone.