Quote Originally Posted by BackWoodsCoder View Post
Not going to bother going through the rest of the thread because it would be pointless to do so. Buying a phone is like so many other consumer devices in which you purchase something that suits you. You may not care to use voice software, but to someone else that may make their lives much easier. You may not care for a camera in the phone, but for me that might mean a decision in choosing one over the other. Reading through this discussion I'm not seeing discussion on why the hardware/technology is better in one phone over the other. Rather I'm seeing a lot of subjective opinions on what people think is a good phone for them and why the iPhone is not that choice. If you don't want or need the features that a smartphone offers, well of course you're not going to be interested in the device.
Good points, all of it. My point of view is a bit different with this, though. You know what I'd like to have? One of those old LED watches. Now that would be cool. You'd have to be pretty old to remember them, as they were in existence for only a couple years in the 80s before the VASTLY superior LCD watches wiped them out. Of course, if I had such a watch, it wouldn't compare to what I am currently wearing, but it would be pretty neat for no other reason than that it would be so obscure.

When it comes to things like smart phones, web apps, and the like, the newest thing is often touted as being 'great'. It isn't, of course, and we all know that. When I bought a 286 back in 92, it was SO much faster than the 8086 that I had been using that it made a tangible difference. Graphs that had taken ten minutes to draw on the screen took less than a single minute!!! That was awesome. Of course, looking back on it, it wasn't awesome at all. It was only an incremental improvement on what had come before. Those graphs are now instantaneous as far as I can perceive.

The same is true of web and mobile. Everything on the market currently sucks. It may be the best we have, but it sucks, and the fact that it is the best we have just means that we have no better alternative. Anybody who doesn't think it sucks needs their head examined. Why do I have to wait a full second for a web page to load? That's absurd. When I write an app, if the next form doesn't show up instantly, I know I have some tinkering to do, yet web designers are alright with a second or three of load time. Why? Because better doesn't yet exist. It will, though.

The same is true for phones. All the smart phones on the market today are terrible. They don't meet my needs, so why would I buy one? The people who do buy them are settling for an inadequate device that will certainly be replaced by a vastly superior device within a couple years at most. Is the 4s good? No, it's quite bad, but it is the best that Apple puts out today. We all know that in a couple years there will be a phone out there that makes the 4s look like trash, but that is because it is trash. It's just the best trash out there today.

I figured out what I wanted in a phone, surveyed the population on the market, and chose not to buy. There isn't a phone out there that will do. But that is going to change. That phone is coming, and one day we will look back on the iPhone 4 as being archaic as those old LED watches. I had one of those, at one time. I wish I still had one, just for the retro look. They were crap. The LED display took so much power that you had to press a button to read the time because, if you left the display on all the time, you'd be changing batteries every few weeks, or less.