Returned to iPhone...

[ChrisTX]

I've gone back and forth between iOS and Android multiple times, and I eventually settled on an iPhone 5. When the honeymoon period is over with any phone, you want to use it as a tool not a toy. I've found that Android devices can be more fun to play around with, but when I need a dependable phone with the best apps and great battery life, the iPhone is hard to beat.

This is the most important thing to keep in mind, and I'm constantly trying to remind myself of this. If I had a better understanding of this, perhaps I'd upgrade less often. But I'll agree, for just getting work done, the iPhone is hard to beat, but Samsung is pretty close.

 

[Chodite]

I guess I'm still in my honeymoon phase.

 

[Shadow Puppy]

Android Malware - out of context or out of control? Of the 51,000 apps that F-Secure reported as being Malware at the end of 2012, only 146 were from Google's Play store and of those 146, only a small percentage of that were considered serious.

SO, out of 800,000 apps in the play store, roughly 50 were considered serious Malware (as in designed to steal info of a personal nature, not something lame like dial or text high cost sex centers and the like). That means you have a .0000625% chance of getting malware from the Play Store. Additionally, Android 4.2.x now scans apps that are side loaded, helping to stop malware from getting on your phone.

Of course, if you are in China and dl apps from nefarious non-Google sources and do a lot of side loading, then you are at serious risk. This is why we never here of infections by "real" users of Android in the US and Europe.

Well said. Fearmongers are always grossly overstating the situation with malware. What they tend to fail to mention is, malware is not very prevalent at all. Infections almost always occur outside the Play Store (often times people trying to get paid apps for free).

 

[ReanimationN]

One advantage the iPhone has is that Google is willing to undermine its own OS by releasing many of the same apps on iOS--and Blackberry just announced that BBM will also be coming to iOS (and Android). Conversely, when do you think we'll see iTunes or iBooks on Android or Blackberry?

This is a massive advantage that iOS has. I felt absolutely no regret when I sold off my Nexus 7 recently- I knew nearly all the Google apps available on Android would make their way over to iOS, or were on iOS already. Right now on my iPhone I'm using Google Maps, GMail, YouTube etc.- they may not be as feature rich as their Android counterparts, but they're there, and they more than get the job done.

 

[Explicitic]

Can we get just a whole thread for these specific posts...so we don't have to look at them every time we come to this forum? They do nothing but spark flame wars between many biased users.

 

[The Game 161]

I've gone back and forth between iOS and Android multiple times, and I eventually settled on an iPhone 5. When the honeymoon period is over with any phone, you want to use it as a tool not a toy. I've found that Android devices can be more fun to play around with, but when I need a dependable phone with the best apps and great battery life, the iPhone is hard to beat.

Least on android you have the option to extend your battery life with an extra battery which would be huge when going away...iphone is a great phone but for me was so limiting to what I wanted to do. Apps obviously very good but the screen size is an issue..but it depends on a persons needs and usage.

 

[cynics]

Very strange. I think your device may be defective though. Maybe related to the flash storage causing things to slow down. Hmm, very odd. Hopefully you don't have issues with your next iOS device because it sounds like you've got a dud!

I hope not. I'm going to do a restore tomorrow so that should tell me. I use my phone A LOT, probably more then even a lot of heavy users so that might have something to do with it too. I'm replacing the battery tomorrow too just cause its worn out, get about 3-4 hours of usage any more so I need to charge it nearly 3 times a day.

 

[mpayne2k]

While I mostly agree with the OP's opinion on widgets being slow to update and mostly ugly, once I get my widgets in line on my Nexus 10 it is rough to go to my iPad Mini and have to manually go into apps to find the same information which populates on my home screens on the Nex10.

There is something about the ease of use once you are comfortable with a setup and stop fiddling with widgets just to dabble.

My main issue with widgets is the lack of design similarity amongst them..it would be nice if widget themes were available to skin your widgets to the same theme.

 

[dsa1971]

Facebook developers know absolutely nothing about developing for Android. Facebook forced their people to finally use Android phones last year some time. Even so, I think they only tried to use an Android phone as if it were an iPhone which is a fail. Look at Facebook home. It was developed solely for Android and more than half of the people who downloaded it gave it one star. If you are using the Facebook widget as an example of its functionality, you are pretty much using one of the worse widgets ever. The FB widget should be a prime example of how never to make an Android widget.

I agree that many widgets are stupid an useless. You can say that about apps in general. There are just so many stupid apps on any platform.

There are however some very useful ones. Toggle widgets and shortcuts to app functions are amongst the more useful one. There are some good ones out there, but there are a lot of bad ones.



That's pretty much how I configure my home screens. I do have some shortcuts as well. The shortcut for SoundHound to immediate start the song ID function is most useful. I have a shortcut to my Twitter traffic feed as well.



I don't buy into the requirement that you need a virus scanner on your phone as long as you stick to the Play Store. If you are installing apps from unofficial or unknown sources, then perhaps you should be more concerned about malware.



I'm glad you are happy with going back to an iPhone. Everyone has their own preference on what device works best for them.

It's not like Facebook has always been flawless on iOS. It's taken years for them to work out the kinks and get it working fairly well. Until last year Facebook was just HTML 5 embedded in an iOS app and it was sucky. It's pretty good on iOS now and I'm sure they'll work it out on android it's just that they've focused more on iOS previously but it's pretty apparent they're focusing on android now