Man, you guys are cranky! Get off my lawn, indeed. Hehe. Personally I love my smart phone. A few years ago before I got a cell phone at all, when all my friends pretty much had them, I was kind of against them. And regular cell phones *aren't* an essential for me - if I had one I would probably keep it off a lot of the time. But a smart phone, that's a different story. So damn useful all the fricking time. I don't see how any serious computer user can avoid their utility for long. They are an awesome complement to a proper computer or laptop.
On another note, an update from my friend who had an iPhone and wanted Android: He bought an HTC Evo 3D with Sprint and he's happy overall, but definitely has a few issues. I'm not clear whether he prefers it over his iPhone fully yet, but I know he's had some problems that he did not have with his iPhone, issues like random reboots and some browser pages persistently reloading. So that's not so great. He was never a huge app user on his iPhone and I don't think he is in Android yet either. But we'll see. I'm curious how things will be in a few months.
I think Mandork has it right: it really depends on which phone you get. And in that regard the iPhone/Android debate is almost *exactly* like the Mac/PC debate. Mac's "just work" (no, not really, but maybe more on average than PCs), largely because they are made by a single manufacturer, have a single OS, and Apple has not been too concerned about long-term backward compatibility nor allowing for a range of hardware upgrades (e.g. few graphics card options). PCs are vastly more configurable and flexible, available in a range of different models, but they have more problems, or at the very least there are *problematic models* and/or manufacturers. So that's the thing, with Android and PCs, you have choice, and choice means *you can make a bad choice*. With iPhone you really have no choice, and while certain specific Android models may exceed iPhone in some areas, *overall* iPhone is a more polished platform and experience. So unless you get a good device on Android, you're likely to find it less "easy to use" than iPhone.
That being said, perhaps an exception to this, or at least an addendum, is that I personally find the iPhone UI atrocious. Once you get it, it's fine, albeit limited and annoying. But having used Android, it's so much more intuitive. I've played with WP7 a bit and really didn't like that either, but it wasn't enough experimenting to say whether I preferred it over iOS. I'm curious to try more since some people do rave about it, but ultimately I'm pretty sold on Android as a base platform. The trick is getting the right phone, right manufacturer, right carrier, and that's a lot of combinations to get right.
So perhaps in summary: Android has higher potential for awesome, iOS has more consistent execution of good-to-awesome. And WP7 doesn't sell enough to matter.
- Oshyan
