As for NFC, I'm probably in the minority who uses it extensively, as most shops around here have readers so I can use Google Wallet. It sounded gimmicky, but once you try it, it's hard to go back (provided there are stores that feature readers). Now, for the most part, I just carry my phone for credit cards and a money clip with some cash and my IDs and one CC just in case.
The other NFC features are pretty much near useless. Many of Samsung's "fancy pants implementations" are proprietary rubbish software features and transferring information by touching phones is nowhere near as seamless as the commercials indicate. In fact, I've never had a single successful transfer where we didn't pull our phones apart and swipe furiously for 5-10 seconds while asking, "um... did it work?". Also, you kind of look like a loser moron with the backs of your phones touching for 20 seconds. Thanks but no thanks, email/text works fine.
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That's just pure FUD. Android doesn't have surveillance on it at all, the only things Google stores are things you save in Google's services like Gmail and Drive, and guess what? Apple does the same with iCloud.
Oh, and Samsung, the biggest Android phone maker, does not lock their bootloaders. Just FYI.
No, it's really not. Android is fundamentally and necessarily integrated with the Google experience, which is designed as an enormous data mine. Did you know that Google parses all of your texts, call transcripts, search history, and emails? Because they do, to better serve targeted advertising.I make a point to deliberately delete history and manage what Google can and cannot do, and even then, it's quite a bit of personal information.
You could argue that using any Google service is giving up the same information to Google, which is true. However, when you have it on your phone, you have a lot more personal information, and more importantly, it's something that's on you 24/7 and gives up a kind of information that computer services don't (what you search on the go, the places you like to go to/search for, etc). For a search company, mobile is the next big frontier, and we'd be kidding ourselves if we said Google's Android wasn't made to sell their services. It's "free", but kind of like a loss leader. You're paying in other ways down the line.
Which may or may not be fine. For me, and clearly most people (though the majority may be uninformed), that's fine. But it's still important to know what's really going.
