lol, iPhone4 vs HTC Evo

Brilliant. That describes so much of the population it isn't funny.

 

Damn, that's funny!

(BTW, my cell phone does not do anything but make telephone calls. Oh, and I can choose from about a dozen different ring tones. And it has a retractable antenna. And the word "Goodbye" appears when I turn it off.)

 

Funny, but what would you expect from an Apple worshiper.

 

Very funny! I'll send it to my wife, I'm sure she will enjoy it too.

AT&T is hopeless where I work so I use an old RAZR with bought minutes through an MVNO called 'Page Plus' that runs on the verizon network, but at home my wife likes her iPhone very much. The differences for her are the OS, and apps not yet available on Android -- not the feature set.

I'm sure hardware build quality will improve on the Android platform quickly over time, but the new HTC I tried the other day was a POS. I'm rooting for Android, but if I wanted to buy a smartphone today and the local AT&T connectivity was OK, I would buy an iPhone hands down.

As for Sprint, the famous 4G is only available to a very small fraction of the country, and their customer relations makes AT&T look good. That is saying something.

 

I would buy an iPhone, but I will never be willing to pay $100 / month to AT&T ever again for any reason. I hate AT&T.

 

^^ We pay about $75/month for 450 anytime minutes, data, and 200 text messages. A $12/month discount is available to many people through 'corporate' discounts -- you just have to ask.

I agree though, AT&T is pretty damn mediocre on many, many levels.

 

Parenthetically, the iPhone venom is itself amusing. Why care what someone else buys ? The last time I remember the venom reaching this pitch was when MS DOS devotees felt threatened ... by Apple.

 

As usual, Lore Sjöberg said it best:

"enraged tweets from people who are unhappy when other people spend money on things they, themselves, don’t want."

 

Also NSFW.

 

Boy, now I don't know which of those phones I should buy, if I had any use for a smart phone, which I don't. My dumb phone makes just as good phone calls as the smart phones, and it has a retractable antenna.

 

^^ Didn't you buy a Nokia handheld last year ?

 

I think it was more like two years ago, and I used it until I got the iTouch, which has a better browser plus plays my music and other audio, and has some games.

And the Nokia N800 is not a phone. It's just a wi-fi internet tablet computer.

 

You just lost your license to smug over smart phone owners. Duct tape your mobile phone to your iPod Touch and what do you have? An iPhone. That's what I have, except without the duct tape.

 

That's duck tape. I don't care what anybody says!

 

One other point: When I am not traveling (and most of the time I am not!) the iTouch sits in the house where I use it mostly for listening to music, podcasts, and Teaching Company lecture series, including while I am on the exercise bike; whereas the cell phone sits in the car so I'll have it in an emergency. My landline phone is my primary phone. The cell phone is only for emergencies, so it stays in the car.

If I duck-taped them together (or traded them in on an iPhone) chances are I'd forget to take it with me, and I'd need to make a call and would not have it with me. So for me, it's actually an advantage to have them as two separate things.

 

I use tracfone and pay 90 bucks a year to have a line to call a tow truck if my car breaks down. Don't have an Iphone and use VOIP. But I do have apple and ATT stock precisely because of the cartoon.

 

I was a tourist in DC a couple of months ago. Google maps used over a cell phone connection was fantastic. More generally, internet services available by cell when Wi-Fi is not available, has value that cannot be replicated by a two device combo of Wi-Fi and voice-only phone.

One other smartphone feature (available on iPhone, and at least on some Android phones) I found *really* useful was the compass.

Is the above worth paying $80+ to a phone company each month ? My wife says yes, I say no. <shrug>. Eventually -- around 2013 -- I hope to buy a used iPhone that runs on the Verizon network. I'll be a customer of an MVNO that lets me pay by minutes/data used. I'm a patient guy.

I decided to ask my wife how much she uses/values the iPhone's smartphone features. Some of her uses (camera, texting, email) are available on vanilla voice phones, although the carriers still add hefty surcharges, and the quality/interface is subpar compared to the iPhone. She has one personal finance app only available on iPhone/iTouch; podcast use that is served very well by the iPod function, and occasional internet services she values highly although uses infrequently.

The bottom line: She likes having *one* device that does it all, and is not limited by Wi-Fi. In our home, diligent use of the budget app is worth the price of admission to the iPhone world; switching carrier from AT&T to T-mobile is not worth the ~10/month savings I might see if I jailbreak her phone, but I'll keep an eye on things.