Actually to answer an earlier post my generalizations are only based on my experience where i happen to live. i see broken Galaxy Ss, SIIs are extremely common, but most Android phones seen here are cheap prepaid junk ala Net10, Straight Talk, GoPhone and so on. most carried by kids. the only time, ONLY time i see anything flagship that's recent is when someone well-paid or well-dressed shows up, and i've seen a total of TWO Note 3s, five Galaxy Tab 2 10.1's, and one LG G Flex. i've seen iPhone 4's and 5's carried by a lot of young girls or women, and that's the extent of interest i see around anything new from Apple. a lot of the people who have been Apple fans since 2007 don't like iOS 7 or 8, and keep whatever they had that ran an older version. or replaced it with one they found at a pawn shop here in town. when i paid my Verizon bill, the couple who got an iPhone 6 activated were teens, and it was going to be her's. coincidence? i am not sure. iOS 7 and up seem to sell to those who are new to Apple, new to iOS, and it seems to be the only interest at this time. my dad carries a first generation iPhone, it does email and phone calls/messaging and browses the web, and that's all he wants. his earlier Motorola flip phone recently died. this is his first smartphone.
My stepfather is new to Apple, never used anything from them. he got an iPhone 5S. he thinks iOS 7 is nice, cool, but he never used earlier versions. he hates Siri and actually argued with it and declared it more problems than it's worth. he does use the fingerprint scanner despite how bad it is at recognizing things. i can actually unlock it myself with my print so whatever it uses to measure biometrics has failed.
my mom still uses an S3, and it's her first smartphone after a BlackBerry Torch (sorry, i refuse to call a BlackBerry a smartphone at all). she does one thing with it--call people. it has replaced her home phone. she never uses apps, or the Play Store (i even disabled it becauses it was lagging and eating up her battery and depleted her data plan once when it had the sync on and auto-update on. she never uses it so i got rid of it)
the type of people here, as well as the typical scenery would have you think this were straight out of Andy Griffith. it does have the 'Mayberry' feel. people here are very stuck in their ways, don't tend to be consumerists, keep things decades old, and only replace them when the device they use failed. they often say they had to get a Galaxy or iPhone because they couldn't find what they wanted, they wanted a StarTAC battery, you can't get those--not even at Batteries Plus. so they either got a Rugby, Convoy 3, or a smartphone out of convenience. do they use apps? games? Angry Birds? flappy Bird? nope. mention 'Flappy Bird' around here you get odd stares because it comes off as something dirty around here.
there are far more flip phones and older models in use than smartphones. are smartphones growing? yep. are they popular among the majority? nope. people either regrettably buy one as the only option, or they are techno geeks from the late 1990s who have the oldest iPhone or whatever works for them.
Sure, there are new ones in stock, there are people buying them, but if you live here you won't see too many S5's or anything new from Apple in use except by the younger set. people my age tend to keep whatever ancient device they got on their contract years ago, justifying it as 'cheaper to keep using what works fine' or 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', or even 'i still keep my Galaxy S or Galaxy Nexus because i'm on a grandfathered unlimited data plan and refuse to pay full price for a new model when mine works fine'
The only mention of NFC is often to sell phones, often by carrier employees, but the most common use is by angry and very aggressive Android fans (who treat Android as some kind of Mormon religion it seems) who think people carrying an iPhone 'need help' and say 'hey my phone has NFC and yours does not' and ironically, most know they have the feature, but either never use it, use it against those who are on an iPhone as some type of superiority complex, or don't even know what it is aside it being on the spec sheet.
fact is, NFC failed here, you can't even buy tags, and Best Buy will give it to you straight--like the charging mats, there was literally no interest and no point in stocking them. no one knows what NFC is. they might have had one or two kids pair their new Galaxy Gear watch to their S4 the first time using NFC but after that it went on unused. as for QR codes, you're two years out of date for those. they might show up here and there but no one knows what they are, and when they do come out in the open, it's often a new business. you're more likely to see a 'like us on Facebook' than a QR Code.
We're often a few years behind every major city. in five years? who knows. Note 3s and S5s might be seen as often as flip phones and iPhone 4's
