Add Apple to that list. iTunes automatically applied an upgrade to my iPhone 3G. Not it runs slower than anything. It's almost unusable. Now I have to decide whether to upgrade to the new Apple hardware, or go with a different brand and possibly a different carrier.
Lightening it up a bit here, my vote is go Android! We have four iPhones in our household and two have failed with hardware issues, each in about a year and a half. Apple's solution: we'll be glad to sell you a new one at $500 (not even mentioning that you can get one for $200 if you renew your AT&T contract). That plus the fact that Apple came out with a defective iPhone 4 that, even if it worked, is still only a marginal improvement, added to my severe dislike for iTunes, led me to get an Evo 4G on Sprint. I wanted to explore the possibility of writing apps for Android anyway so it was a no brainer for me. What I didn't expect was how much I'd like that phone! I was a bit worried about Sprint coverage because I'm in a "fringe" area until I found out that Sprint and Verizon share cell towers. Sure enough, I get better service with Sprint than I ever did with the AT&T and the iPhone: I can use the phone in the doctors office (quietly on 3G)
because I actually have a signal and I can use it inside stores like Best Buy where the iPhone has zero signal. But that's just the reception side. I am ecstatic about how much better the Evo 4G is than our iPhones in general! The screen is finally big enough to see while the phone is only marginally bigger (no wasted screen real estate like the iPhone). I can just click and drag my MP3 files from my Windows media center folders right to the phone, and I can even play all the MP3's from Windows Media Center through wifi in the house, which means while around the house, I have access to my entire library of MP3's that I access via all the computers and my Xbox 360. Want a ringtone? Just drag an MP3 or a WAV file right to the ringtones folder. On the iPhone, you have to convert it to some Apple format, try to get iTunes to accept it into it's "library", connect the phone, sync it, then it won't let you sync without either wanting to delete apps or sync those too. Can't just sync ringtones alone. And you'd better not have plans that day if iTunes decides it wants to back up your phone and you make the mistake of letting it do that!
Anyway, I find the Evo a brave new world without limitations. I now realize how restrictive the iPhone really is and I'm really enjoying all I can do on Android. If you want to look at some good Android phones, there's the Evo 4G on Sprint or the Droid X on Verizon right now. They're both great. I prefer Sprint due to the lower prices and I also lean toward the Evo 4G just because I like the interface and the "soft" buttons on the front rather than the "push" buttons on the Droid X. I'm paying about $20/mo less for the exact same service as I was getting on the iPhone... minus the poor reception.
Oh, and when you get a firmware update on an Android phone, you get a message on your phone that the firmware is ready to install. You click on the phone, and 5 minutes later you are done. No computer needed. Beats spending half a day trying to update the iPhone through iTunes! One final observation: all of our iPhones (we have 2G, 3G, and 3GS... not buying into the iPhone 4) would continually get into a state where 3G data would stop working. They'd generally work for maybe a day but then when you go to use the browser and you have full 3G bars, it just hangs. Rebooting the phone always fixed the problem. I think it's a bug that Apple never acknowledged. Same thing happens with push notifications. They work for a few hours and then just stop. Have to cold boot the phone to get them working again. I never have problems like that on the Evo. Never have to "reboot" it and the 3G just always works. In fact, AT&T claims they have the fastest 3G network but I don't see it. The Evo is faster on 3G than my iPhones ever were. The iPhones seem to "stutter" on 3G. Load a little, wait, load a little, wait. The Evo is just smooth and seems to load faster. And that's when both phones are getting a full 3G signal.
My 1 cent...
Mike
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