Nothing impressive with this. I know of a few companies that sold crappy devices with crappy OS's. RIM, Nokia, etc. and they dominated the market.
Android has become the new Nokia.
Big Market Share. Worthless user-base.
Android has become the new Nokia.
Big Market Share. Worthless user-base.
You sound exactly like these people standing in line for iPhones in the Samsung commercial.
If you look at actual US sales, both iOS and Android are on the rise mostly by eating BlackBerry's lunch. Android is still almost 2x the size of iOS but again there far more popular on the cheap handset market and are harder to target due to the fragmented market.
http://www.asymco.com/2012/03/07/the-unrelenting-trends-in-t...
Another interesting statistic, from Opera, was their report that iPad produced more ad revenue than all of Android.
Their potential customers are not people standing in line for hours to buy an iPhone, so the ad is spot on.
Assuming you consider no LTE and a plastic body to be "on par".
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6426/ipad-4-gpu-performance-an...
And as Taligent noted, as always the PowerVR GPU in the iPhone absolutely without question smokes every crappy Mali GPU in every Android phone ever.
I don't think that 2x faster GPU improves UX a lot for the average user. Accurate maps are more important IMHO.
I think that statement says more about Android fans than it does about "the average users". Who needs a fluid UI and responsiveness that can't be beat? That hardly affects the U-->X<-- which stands for experience let's not forget.
The way iOS works benefits heavily from an overpowered GPU because it was designed with hardware acceleration as a core consideration from the ground up. Android device manufacturers tend to spend that component funding where it counts in Android, bumping up the RAM to reduce slowdowns instead.
> And for me, 3G is fast enough (about 2Mbit/s where I live).
It's true, 640k of memory ought to be enough for anybody.
> Accurate maps are more important IMHO.
Good thing I have accurate maps then. Possibly the most overblown issue in history, the Apple Maps are actually fine. Weaker in most areas but stronger than I expected at launch, and good enough that I don't miss Google Maps.
If you think they're "inaccurate" then you're doing more tech-news reading than actual investigating. They're plenty accurate. Considering you have the world to work with, obviously this doesn't apply everywhere. However, neither does the conventional wisdom that Google maps is better. In certain areas that Google has neglected, Apple maps is already better right out of the gate.
Ok, LTE improves UX, but it's not that big deal as you make it sound.
Apple Maps may be ok where you live, but overall the consensus is (even among Apple fanboys and Apple CEO) that Google Maps are better.
No LTE, poor build quality, slow CPU/GPU, average camera.
Engadget complained that the glass back easily cracked and that the camera was average. And we know from Anandtech benchmarks that the CPU/GPU is about half that of the iPhone 5.
Nice cherry-picking on the benchmarks. So the second fastest phone in the world is "slow". Gotcha.
Did they actually crack one or were they inferior based on the iPhone and ignoring all of the work they did to make it more damage resistant?
"As of right now, it is officially my favorite phone by a healthy margin. It’s just so fast, so smooth, and the software is great."
NFC, 2 times bigger RAM, gerat build quality, quad-core processor.
Even if you think that iP5 is superior, you have to admit that N4's value / price is way higher.
I don't know how you define innovative if you don't consider the amazing intelligence behind Google Now innovative, or don't find the new 4.2 features innovative, or at least innovative in a smartdevice OS. I hate to tell you because it seems you are vitriolic about the point, but it's always been about ads, they're a business. But obviously the experience has to be compelling enough to get you to buy into it .... so OF COURSE they're competing on experience. And anyone who's used an Android phone recently in good faith knows that.
What's this nonsense about them "not caring" anyway. Do you REALLY think that Irving "cares" more about the design of iOS than Duarte cares about Android? And does it really make a difference, especially given that Android has managed to avoid the 2005 era plastic skeumorphism and created something awesome in its own right with Holo?
Again, this isn't 2009 anymore.
Sorry, but I just don't get the argument - if people want a smart phone, any Android phone is a smart phone. If they didn't they would be still buying Nokia true dumb phones. If people want a lower cost smartphone - like those in 3rd world - why would you have a problem with that? Also why aren't people buying cheap RIM phones or cheap Windows Phones if cheap is all they are into?
Older versions? Why would that have anything to do with SmartPhone sales numbers? It is just asinine to look at this from a negative or Apple Salesman attitude.
Fact is simple - people are continuing to buy Androids for many reasons - choice, preference, cost whatever. If Android is enabling the poorer sect of the world to get connected/enabled/smart at a cost they can afford - that's a good thing.
[1] http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
No, 70% of the market doesn't care and merely what the blingest device for the lowest cost with the highest amount of minutes and texts, data is barely an afterthought. Samsung offering sales commissions doesn't hurt either, or is that 'just a weird inconvenient fact'?