Just note that I can find a cheaper, or free version of almost everything you're talking about that is available on Android.
Lordy, I'm the ultimate cheapskate... I just counted. There's 151 different Apps including the built-ins on my iPhone. I've paid for Foreflight, LogTen Pro, and 12 others. They all do different things I want on my device, or I dump them. Subtract 4 from that number, since I'm currently "demoing" 5 different free RDP Apps to cull down to one that I'll keep. Put all five on for free, will keep the best one. Haven't had to do enough RDP lately to spend any time on the testing.
Oh, btw, what built in app do you use for Turn By Turn directions when you get to a city you've never been to before? How about to find a gas station when you're almost out of gas on the freeway in the middle of nowhere?
I typically "flight plan" better than that. ;-)
The ability to have widgets which display useful information on the homescreen makes all the difference in the world. Want to see your email? Use the email widget. Calendar? Calendar Widget. Both at the same time? Hey, they're both there. Takes 4 taps or even more to get even close to that on iOS.
Actually I *don't* want to read or see my e-mail unless I open it. It's a "avoid distractions" thing.
You never sent picture messages? You still don't? Really??
Why pay to send pictures through MMS when you can just e-mail them?
Call me old-fashioned.
I think I've done it three times in all the years I've owned an iPhone -- and that was because I knew the person on the other end was a) mobile, and b) didn't have a phone that could receive e-mail but could receive MMS. That seems to be the teeny-bopper and T-mobile phone market crowd to a T. Frankly with Push e-mail, SMS loses value rapidly.
You wanted a cell phone that didn't suck and you got a Smart Phone, when all Smart Phones, iPhone included, took about 30 steps backwards in mobile voice clarity and battery life?
I have to agree with you there, but I think Kent's meaning was "hated their cell phone user interface", really. And I think you knew that, too. You took advantage of his missing words.
All cell phones have lost voice clarity. That's a network function more than the phones. CODECs are tighter and tighter. Then we all stuff those through Bluetooth for an even more awful audio experience.
I'll have you know that most people did not "hate" their mobile phones back then, people were actually quite happy with crap like the RAZR. However most people hated their Smart Phones back then because they were stuck with Windows Mobile or if they were business people, Blackberries.
Haha... "I'll have you know!!..." that's funny...
I didn't hate my multiple Blackberry phones. They did e-mail fine.
I did have a love/hate relationship with my Palm devices, mostly 'cause they crashed all the time.
I really hated the RAZR, but they were basically free by the time I used one. Nokia 2160i was pretty good. Favorite form-factor in that size and around that time was the Nokia 8260. Probably my favorite "phone-only" phone, ever. TDMA back then sounded good. Battery was great on that thing. Tiny size, it'd fit in a jeans pocket along with other stuff. Loud as all get-out. Back would fall off once in a while in your pocket, though.
Least favorite phone ever... Kyocera QCP 6035. What a god-awful mix of Palm and phone. At least it wasn't as fugly as the Handspring VisorPhone!
The true changer toward Smart Phones people liked was not the iPhone as you suspect, but the BlackBerry Pearl 8100. That phone was a PITA to use, but had so many features people loved them. I hated it because it broke every rule about phones, but not in a good way.
It was the cheapest-built Blackberry I ever owned. But it was small and light and still did e-mail pretty well. The other features, sucked. Web? Laughable attempt at that. Wasn't much else... a badly written calendar sync made it suck at calendars with any real recurrency-based events in them, and I found a few ways to instantly crash it in most of the other "PDA" functions.
The little roller ball was the cheap part... always sticking, never accurate. Good for its day, but a good touch-screen interface was the REAL thing that saved smart-phones.
I missed my full-sized Blackberry keyboard when I went to the Pearl. I thought I wouldn't. But I did.
You hit the point that drove the iPhone home: Apple freaks bought them so that they could have a piece of fruit on the back of their PC and their PCS.
I love how you label people freaks. There are the Apple freaks, yes... the people who stand in lines at the retail stores and wait for things on release day... or maybe they're just the type of folks who like to go to such "events".
But there's a large bunch of people who buy the stuff just because it works for them, not because of the logo. My old boss would be a good example... he's an old Unix guy. Doesn't care about Apple in the slightest. But he and his family had a number of their products. They also had other competitor's products too, in their household. They bought whatever worked for them.
The whole "freak" thing gets kinda old. No one here is calling you an "Android Freak" in this discussion. How about being civil about it?
If they hated their mobile phones, it was because they had Smart Phones (HTC and Blackberry were king back then, although Motorola's Blackjack was pretty popular too IIRC).
Those really weren't that bad. Well, the Blackjack was awful, but that's because Motorola still to this day can't design a UI to save their asses. Anroid and the oh-so-imaginitive "Droid" campaign, just saved Motorola's cellular division. 'Bout time.
They were great at RF, and thus very early to market in the cell phone world overall -- first brick phone, everyone had a flip/StarTAC back in the day, etc. But when the UI had to do something more than DTMF... they fell down. Hard. Nokia ate them alive. Nokia phones had "style". Moto was still building bricks.
Again, except that it didn't do half of the stuff a "dumb phone" could do, and was using technology that was at least 5 years behind. Note that the same design model exists in today's Verizon iPhone: Rather than use the standard that Verizon has in all of their new phones, they chose not to go 4G. But people still bought them.
Verizon probably had no say in that decision at all. Neither did Apple, really if the rumors floating around are true, that Qualcomm's promised multi-carrier/multi-technology chipset (both GSM and CDMA and all the high-speed data variants layered on top of that) was still in Alpha even though they'd promised Apple it'd be ready to go for iPhone 4.
Apple wanted to build a single phone, and then via firmware tell it which carrier and technology to use, so they could have a single device supply chain world-wide. Makes sense. For that to happen you need a radio chipset up to the task.
Every CDMA phone manufacturer on the planet must license CDMA technology from Qualcomm. There is zero choice in that. If you look a little deeper behind the scenes, you'd see that all hardware manufacturers in that space are wholly-dependent on Qualcomm and what they deliver. If Qualcomm slips a deadline, everyone else does too.
iOS's native browser doesn't handle Flash. In fact, no Apple App does.
Neither does anyone else's... they all license from Adobe. MSIE, Opera, Chrome, whatever... all have to add in Adobe's proprietary product in order to work.
1. HTML5 is the way of the future, yes. But the future is 2022, not 2011. Right now, we are using a model of HTML5 that will not be HTML5 until 2022, and we are using a non-standards compliant version of HTML (
http://www.webmonkey.com/2008/09/html_5_won_t_be_ready_until_2022dot_yes__2022dot/)
And everyone used HTML 1, 2, 3, and 4 for years before those were fully "ratified" as standards. Goes for most of the RFC'd protocols that run the entire Internet, really.
Standards aren't like they once were, where they're set in stone and only then do manufacturers use them. They're fluid until they're already obsolete.
It's a goofy game. But I point it out because HTML 5 will be ratified by the time we're all using HTML 6 -- and 7 is already being tinkered with by developers.
2. You can turn off flash in Android if you don't want it. In fact, you can uninstall it if you really don't want it. But you don't have any options in iOS. You do what you're told, and you can't experiment. I prefer having the option of trying to view a site rather than not being allowed to view a site.
So you don't want Apple dictating what their device can or can't do, but you don't mind Adobe dictating that Flash is "the standard" when it's not? LOL!
I suppose if you really enjoy going to mobile versions of your favorite websites from your 10 inch screen with a crappy resolution (1024x768 IIRC), rather than going to a full version of your favorite website from a 10 inch screen with a much higher resolution, without losing functionality due to not being able to view content that works on every other browser (Mac included), then there's no way you can see the problem with the iPad.
Yup...
"We don't care if we have Flash."
"Then you don't see the problem!"
"Nope."
ROFLMAO... you're great fun, Nick. Seriously.
You really don't want to admit that some people do buy iPads not because they're Apple "freaks" or because they're somehow mentally deficient... but because they find the device does what they need, just fine.
I readily admit that others buy Android because those also do what they need, just fine.
Your arguments remind me of other circular arguments...
"Guns are bad."
"Not for me."
"Yeah, but you don't see the problem! Guns are bad."
And...
"A college education is required."
"But I know how to do things your college grads don't, that you need to run your business, and I'm cheaper and happier to have the job."
"Yes, but a college education is required."
And...
"[Insert favorite political party here] is bad."
"Because your'e in the other one?"
"Yes. You fail to see the problem. [Party] is bad."
Thus...
"iPad is bad."
"But it does whatever I've wanted it to do."
"Yeah, but you don't see the problem! iPad is bad!"
Uhhhnnng.... [beat head here]... Okay.
You keep saying iPad is bad for everyone, and then give a whole bunch of reasons that only matter to YOU. Okay, we get it. You don't want an iPad. Don't buy one.
I didn't want a Commodore 64 back in the day either. I was a Tandy fan. Guess which one sold more units on FAR weaker technology?
"A serial interface to a floppy drive? Puh-lease!" -- I used to say.
"The Motorola 6809E chipset kicks the 6502 up and down the block!" -- I used to say.
"I can run Microware OS/9 on this thing, a Real-Time OS! With a frakkin' hard drive!" -- I used to say.
Didn't mean squat at the sales register.
Console yourself -- we still have to have a "C:\" drive because DOS won out over all other sane operating systems where the OS would allow you to name the main drive whatever you wanted, and kept track of low-level crap out of sight of the user. Bad tech wins in the market ALL the time.
If you truly think the iPad is "bad", it just doesn't matter. It may still win in the marketplace for a good long time.
We're still running computers today that haven't had floppy disks in years, with drive letters "A" and "B" still reserved for them. And that... in 2011... is utterly retarded.
It won't matter who wins the overall sales numbers this year, or next. Someone will come up with something "better" every year.
Whether they call it something new, or just slap a higher version number on it, is just Marketing. Android version 10000, or iOS version 20... they'll either do things the users want them to do, or they won't sell.
The most interesting trend in computing these days is the conflict between "business" and "personal" computing. Even HP gives a nod to it in their marketing material, "The computer is personal again." But at most companies, it's really not.
Even funnier, same company, same marketing department... the Business-class laptops are called "EliteBooks".
So are you Elite if you have a business PC, and not Elite if you have one of the others, even though they've promised your computer is "Personal" again? ROFLMAO.
(By the way, HP's making pretty nice machines these days... but they're forever known as a printer company... and an expensive printer company at that...)
I bring up the Marketing story to point out something to you Nick... you're VERY wrapped up in not liking Apple's "cult-like" Marketing strategy.
I know a number of folks that have that feeling, and it's kinda fun to watch you guys get all worried about it.
The point above is that all manufacturers are doing that these days... HP's a bit more subtle about it, is all.
Palm was king of the smartphones for a few years... and pioneered and crushed all competition for a long time in the "PDA" market. Now they're virtually dead and gone now. The end of their PDA reign was the release of their technology to Handspring.
I had a Diamond Rio MP3 player once too.
All these tech gadgets, will pass into oblivion. The thing that won't pass into oblivion, is the fact that we all have cheap touch-screen tech that can bring our charts into the cockpit without a 200 lb. Jepp bag now.
My old giant Jepp binder bag just got re-purposed as a padded case for a CAP radio. It ain't never takin' another airplane ride, ever again.
