Android is effectively iPhone without the walls. If you like living in a prison, then keep supporting the iPhone/iPad. If you like Freedom, choose Android. And for what it's worth, the Nexus One is a much nicer piece of hardware than the iPhone. Far, far faster and the screen is light years ahead.
I think of the iPhone more like a mall than a prison. Yes it is not the wildwest. There is some lame mall cop there in the corner but its nice, safe and clean. And because people feel secure and there is no crime people are spending a making a lot of money there.
Android is more chaotic. The software is a mess - geeky, unintuitive. It does not have the design perfection. Buttons on the Nexus just plain don't work but it does not matter that much because you don't really need them anyway? So why are they there? Because no one cares. The trackball on a touch device - no point to that. It's design by committee and it ends up being messy.
That screen is very detailed but don't take it outside. Wait, it is a mobile device. A mobile indoor device.
Oh I see what you mean. It could be any number of things that restricts what consumers can do or implicitly add to their costs or degrades their level of service. Length of the contract, amount charged for early termination, service and other fees, level of service, etc. I don't think the specifics matter here, we can talk about this in somewhat abstract terms. Lets take a simplified case, suppose consumers and service providers are on equal footing, and the contract they end up negotiating says that the provider guarantees to provide 10GB of voice and data per month, in return for the consumer to agree to a 1 year obligation. Now suppose that the wireless provider has more power than the consumer, the contract they end up negotiating may say that the provider guarantees to provide 5GB of voice and data per month in return for the consumer to agree to a 2 year obligation. This is not necessarily a realistic example but I hope it illustrates how the two sides of a contract may not get the same out of the contract if they don't have the same negotiating power.
The problem you have is you are a single individual negotiating the contract, so things like quanities will be fixed by the provider, the only negotiating power you have is to not accept the contract, this the same for all types of service providers, it is certainly not restricted to mobile networks. But at the end of the day, your power is the same you can reject the contract, and it owning a mobile is a must have, then just go pre-pay, you have just as much rights as a contract customer.
But in saying that, do you not have no-term contracts in the US?
... The trackball on a touch device - no point to that. It's design by committee and it ends up being messy...
Seems you never really used Android. Trackball is a great feature - it gives you mode that is otherwise unavailable on touch devices. Example : there are some web pages, that are useless on iPhone, since they rely on hovering by mouse over elements. Android's browser is more usable there. You may say that you don't care, same way you might not care that there is no access to those "just ads" pages, that use Flash, but there are people who see this as advantage.
Another reason is that you can do things that are otherwise very difficult or impossible while you work one-handed on the phone. I love the trackball and this would be probably a "no go" for me if it is removed from the device.
Comments
Android is effectively iPhone without the walls. If you like living in a prison, then keep supporting the iPhone/iPad. If you like Freedom, choose Android. And for what it's worth, the Nexus One is a much nicer piece of hardware than the iPhone. Far, far faster and the screen is light years ahead.
I think of the iPhone more like a mall than a prison. Yes it is not the wildwest. There is some lame mall cop there in the corner but its nice, safe and clean. And because people feel secure and there is no crime people are spending a making a lot of money there.
Android is more chaotic. The software is a mess - geeky, unintuitive. It does not have the design perfection. Buttons on the Nexus just plain don't work but it does not matter that much because you don't really need them anyway? So why are they there? Because no one cares. The trackball on a touch device - no point to that. It's design by committee and it ends up being messy.
That screen is very detailed but don't take it outside. Wait, it is a mobile device. A mobile indoor device.
Oh I see what you mean. It could be any number of things that restricts what consumers can do or implicitly add to their costs or degrades their level of service. Length of the contract, amount charged for early termination, service and other fees, level of service, etc. I don't think the specifics matter here, we can talk about this in somewhat abstract terms. Lets take a simplified case, suppose consumers and service providers are on equal footing, and the contract they end up negotiating says that the provider guarantees to provide 10GB of voice and data per month, in return for the consumer to agree to a 1 year obligation. Now suppose that the wireless provider has more power than the consumer, the contract they end up negotiating may say that the provider guarantees to provide 5GB of voice and data per month in return for the consumer to agree to a 2 year obligation. This is not necessarily a realistic example but I hope it illustrates how the two sides of a contract may not get the same out of the contract if they don't have the same negotiating power.
The problem you have is you are a single individual negotiating the contract, so things like quanities will be fixed by the provider, the only negotiating power you have is to not accept the contract, this the same for all types of service providers, it is certainly not restricted to mobile networks. But at the end of the day, your power is the same you can reject the contract, and it owning a mobile is a must have, then just go pre-pay, you have just as much rights as a contract customer.
But in saying that, do you not have no-term contracts in the US?
... The trackball on a touch device - no point to that. It's design by committee and it ends up being messy...
Seems you never really used Android. Trackball is a great feature - it gives you mode that is otherwise unavailable on touch devices. Example : there are some web pages, that are useless on iPhone, since they rely on hovering by mouse over elements. Android's browser is more usable there. You may say that you don't care, same way you might not care that there is no access to those "just ads" pages, that use Flash, but there are people who see this as advantage.
Another reason is that you can do things that are otherwise very difficult or impossible while you work one-handed on the phone. I love the trackball and this would be probably a "no go" for me if it is removed from the device.