That said, I wasn't really impressed by any of the other points the article makes. It starts out by saying 'Android on the Nexus 4 is better in almost every aspect', but besides the sharing thing it doesn't make a case for anything else. Some half-hearted observation that 'sometimes it even appears like rendering is smoother on the Nexus 4' and 'not all Android applications look like crap anymore' and that's about it. Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone.
Hardly a clear-cut case of 'better in almost every aspect'. Looks like it's more a matter of preference than an objective evaluation on which of the 2 platforms is 'better'.
Good grief, you speak of personlisation like it's a bug and not a feature. I personally hate the iOS window-dressing. You have this sleek-looking bit of hardware, but the OS looks plastic and Fisher-Price, with safe and chunky buttons to give to your kid with no sharp edges. The way you speak, it sounds like you would deny me my preference for something different because you think it's ugly. What about those who don't think the default skins look good? Why isn't it a good feature that we can customise the way things look?
I really don't understand the Apple-spawned fanboy cult that considers personalisation to be a bad thing - especially since they once had a successful marketing campaign based around personalising your hardware with the coloured macs.
I always find it amusing how fans of customizability seem to over-estimate the importance of dicking around with something the vast majority of people primarily use as a tool, a useful utility. If the defaults work well (which seems to be the case for iOS, even toddlers appear to be able to use it), that's already much, much better than something that sucks by default but can be customized to suck less.
That said, if you really care about customizability, you can always jailbreak your iPhone and do whatever you like, lots of customizations possible on jailbroken iPhones. Or just buy an Android phone if customizability is high on your list of priority features. Again, this is more about personal preference than anything else.
On a side note: Years ago when I was just starting to use Linux, I spent weeks customizing every aspect of the look & feel of the user interface. After a while I always got bored with what I had and started to get irritated by the various usability issues my customizations had introduced, so I started over. I went from FVWM to fluxbox, to Gnome, to KDE, back to Gnome, to XFCE and then back to Gnome again. The last time I switched to Gnome I stopped caring about customizations and simply stuck with the defaults, I had more interesting and important things going on in my life to spend time on, instead of wasting my time trying to be smarter than the people who designed the user interfaces I was using. I bought my first Mac running OS X and just used it the way Apple designed it, and never looked back. Since then I lost intereset in customizing my computers and phones altogether, realizing it's more like a hobby than actually making anything 'better', because 9 out of 10 times, you're only making things worse.
" the Apple-spawned fanboy cult"
This is a completely meaningless phrase. It's easy to accuse people of this and impossible to prove. Furthermore when you say something along the lines of "you're just a fanboy of company X" the other guy can just come back and say "well you're a fanboy of company Y" and then everyone sounds ridiculous.
But to your point, I personally like the Apple design and I think that too much customization really can make a beautifully designed piece of hardware look like crap. That said, I also understand that other people either really love customizing their phones and/or have awful taste and that's fine and for them, iOS isn't the best choice. Whatevs. It happens. The thing is, you can't please all the people all the time so I'd say it's a great thing that Apple limits what you can do to personalize the phone. That's one thing that attracts people like me to it. Luckily they're not the only game in town so for the others you have choices.
You're really taking this as a direct insult it seems. I wish you wouldn't have made that fanboy crack because you did have a decent point in there under all the anger.
I don't spend my time changing my desktop items. I don't customise my chrome borders, fiddle with rainmeter, etc. I don't even change my desktop background from the first one I got years and years ago. This may not be a very "hacker" attitude, but for me I just want function by default.
Personalisation is never a bad thing, but having a worse default is. Not wanting to faff with your display to get something acceptable is entirely within reason. In each case it is a choice, and the ability to personalise your screen is very much a subjective benefit.
I looked up how to switch applications and all I got was "10 best task switcher apps." I don't have time to evaluate three, much less ten task switcher apps! All I've been able to find is if you hold down the main button and then scroll to task manager, you can get to one.
I like customization, but Apple's defaults were better for me, at least. You say Fisher-Price, I say well conceived and 1960's Braun.
Things I still miss:
I still miss that android apps can download in the background so for example when I wake up I the morning any new podcasts I'm subscribed to are already on the phone. Contrast to iOS6 where I have to remember to manually run the app. Which generally means I only run it just as I'm about to get in the car. I then sit in my entry way for 2-6 minutes waiting for my podcast app to download
I miss that apps can register for more events and act on them. For example any app can register to get an event when a new photo is saved. It can then upload, in the background, that photo. That means I can install one Flickr app, one g+ app and one fb app and the photos get uploaded to all 3 services no matter which app I use to take the photo. Contrast to ios6 where either every photo app has to have built in uploading options for every service I could possibly want. Or, I have to manually run the specific app for each service.
I miss auto app updating. I don't have as many apps as most of my friends on my iPhone but it seems like every day or every other day there's a number on the app store bugging me to update stuff. having to manually update is a distraction, chore, and annoyance I don't need.
Of course I miss being able to choose various default apps. I want Camera+ to be my default camera. I want Google maps to be my default maps. I want gmail to be my default mail app. I want a different apps to be my default music player and video player. I want chrome to be my default browser.
I miss being able to customize my desktop and lock screen. Not just adding widgets but changing it to use other apps. See http://slidescreenhome.com as one example.
I miss geeky things like being able to run an ssh tunnel in one app and use that tunnel in another app.
That said I'm still on iPhone. There's still plenty of things I like about iPhone over Android. I don't see myself switching back for at least a few more generations.
For example, you can set your home address in Downcast or Instapaper so that when you leave or arrive, those apps will fetch new content without you having to open the app. Downcast will even download the podcasts in the background.
Now, this requires you to move outside the fence, so it's not time based. But I had a decent system where I had my work and home address in Downcast and I set it to fetch whenever I leave or arrive. My regular commute meant that I was always triggering the geo fence.
The trade-off is to have background downloading on all the time, which is something I hated about android in the 4 years I used it. Background processes were always killing my battery and it was never obvious what was running.
I think the sane compromise that I wish apple would make is to allow for more permanent background tasks to run, but only when externally powered.
But surely, what really is missing on iOS is the whole intent/sharing system. It's just painful to try to interact between several apps on my iPad.
Btw. One of the more beautiful homescreens is: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tsf.shell
Or widgets: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.levelup.be...
Those are things that i simply can't get on iOS and i'm used to it. I want that on my mobile.
A cluttered, unusable homescreen (is a ridiculous 3D cylinder of icons really an option?) and a weather widget where most of the text is unreadable.
I personally don't want anything like that. I would rather Apple just allow widgets in the notifications section and have live icons.
I am an Objective-C developer and I love the SDKs on the iPhone, but I am just so tired of Apple's bullshit regarding using our devices the way we want to. I'm tired of waiting for them to enable basic features like phone number black/whitelists.
My next device will be a Nexus. Then I can run apps in the background other than music, share data between apps, sideload apps from third parties, run a mobile terminal, run mobile scripting languages, and basically be free to use my hardware as I'd like.
Keep in mind that's a basic feature for you, not necessarily for all. I wouldn't use it, so I'd prefer Apple to work on X/Y/Z feature instead. Feature priority is hard to work out at the best of times, because no matter what gets picked someone will be disappointed.
For those who want more information on that, http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-... (note: it's a 3-part series).
As far as I understand, it doesn't provide for an application "register[ing] itself to handler certain data and events", which would probably be an extension to UIActivityView and UIActivity[0]. Remove View Controllers provide two features of interest, one of which could work with UIActivity for sharing:
* An application or framework providing views to an other one (said view could be invoked by a UIActivity of some sort, so that the Facebook application would provide a "Share on Facebook" remote view and the corresponding activity, a sharing application would invoke the activity view, then display the correct remote view upon selection by the user)
* Isolated cross-process communication between the embedding application and the embedded view, which allows different security settings (and thus things like JIT-ed UIWebView, or more simply a twitter remote viewcontroller being able to use the data the Twitter app has access to without leaking it to third parties)
[0] http://oleb.net/blog/2012/09/the-state-of-sharing-in-ios-6/
Agreed. I really don't like the look of most Android customisations. I think default Android is pretty gorgeous, though.
My homescreen currently looks like this - http://i1.minus.com/iidfIgCTZsXEX.png
The only thing I've added is the widget: everything else is stock. I'm very happy with the way it looks.
Hopefully, there has been some serious work done on iOS 7 and it'll probably address most of the OP's concerns.
However, I do hope they introduce none of these customization shenanigans. I don't care for widgets (nor do I want another icon or thing I cannot remove from my homescreen). If the base OS is sufficiently good UI-wise, there is no reason ever to need to customize its looks besides the wallpaper (e.g. OS X).
This means that I can have a list of (for example) upcoming birthdays on my phone that I see over and over again, enough that I will eventually see the reminder at a point when I am in a position to do something about it. Alarms are useless by comparison, because I will inevitably be busy with something else when they go off. Calendars/todo apps are equally useless to me, because they require me to remember to open up an app all the time.
I realise my use case is relatively niche, but I imagine there's a lot of different niche users out there that benefit from customisability.
I take it you share Jobs' opinion on clothes? Same jeans, sneakers, turtleneck every day. Hey, it's perfectly functional, why would anyone want to vary things or look different? I mean, everyone has the same use-case, right?
Ha, sorry, reminds me of that Samsung commercial. We're going to get that in the next one.. right?
Things change.
I assume he made that kind of statements because previously his opinion of android was the buggy and extreme unresponsive early builds.
I was very impressed with the overall experience. If I wasn't so used to iOS, I could easily see myself using Android on a Nexus 4. But in the end, I walked away with the opposite impression; I saw no compelling reason to switch to Android and have decided iOS is still the mobile OS for me. Unlike the author, I do not really consider myself a power user. The customizability of Android is really enticing, but at the end of the day I find myself preferring the design/philosophy of iOS. But it really just comes down to personal preference.
After using an iPhone for so long, I became annoyed at the small design/interface differences present in the Nexus 4 (e.g. no physical home button). At times I found it difficult to use the Nexus 4 because of it's greater width. The iPhone width is optimal for my hand size and pocket size. Also, in my opinion as an app developer, the iOS app ecosystem still seems a lot stronger than Android. Browsing the Play Store was a little boring to me. Yes, most popular apps have both iOS and Android versions, but many developers still target iOS first and Android second. Until there's a reason for that to change I think iOS still has the edge in "killer" apps.
That being said, I agree that there are a lot of nice things in Android that I would love to see implemented in iOS.
Just like they got their thumbs surgically altered when the 5 came out, no doubt you will be getting all your pockets resized if Apple increases the iPhone width.
The iPhone 5 compromises to make the screen bigger, but only by a little.
I don't think I could use a 4" device like a Nexus 4 (I have a Nexus S which was a good size), on my commute where I need to hold onto a handle of the train, underground with one hand, smartphone in other.
I care more about my phone's abilities than I do about what people think of me when I'm holding it up to my ear. (Which only happens maybe once a week for me, anyway.)
The main things I miss are better google voice integration on the nexus phones (the ability to use the web interface for texting is something I can't give up). I also used to not pay for texting this way and could actually afford to have a smart phone because of it since Tmobile has a $30 no contract 100min/unlimited data plan for unsubsidized phones.
I also needed some sort of google talk app which I finally found with the $5 version of the verbs app. A bunch of people I communicate with are on android and use google chat instead of facebook chat or imessage.
The current iPhone does some things much better. The biggest thing is battery life which is at least twice as good as any nexus phone I've used (probably even more). The difference in battery is really incredible. The new native Facebook iOS app is also great to use. The iPhone hardware is also subjectively much nicer, it both looks and feels a lot better to me - makes me wish Google had partnered with Nokia.
Really though they're both pretty equivalent at the point.
Edit: Almost forgot, the critical feature of android was turn by turn navigation which apple finally came out with in iOS6. Now that google's released their maps app as well the core differences that mattered are gone.
What's frustrating though is the inability of Google Voice to receive SMS from short codes. Craigslist and Paypal also don't verify accounts with a Google Voice number.
Also, if you are using CyanogenMod (or many other custom builds) you can change the performance settings on your cpu governer, etc., to improve it further.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6425/google-nexus-4-and-nexus-...
Google Now is amazing. iOS fluidity still has no equal. Google play automatic app updates are convenient. iOS apps polish is extraordinary. Windows Phone tiles are fantastic. BB contact integration is a thing of beauty...etc.
Now on an HTC One X, which I like more than the iPhone. It doesn't have any of the quality issues of the GNexus.
I've been using the iPhone for a while before switching to a Nexus 4, and honestly there is nothing that feels more fluid on iOS than on a Nexus 4 running jelly bean 4.2.1.
I first had an iPhone when it came out, then moved to a BlackBerry (weird, I know), and now I'm considering staying with Android, at least for daily use. I still have to stick to the BlackBerry as it's the only phone on the market that provides international roaming at affordable prices, very good battery life (+replaceable, I have my own arsenal and can go for weeks travelling without charging the phone) and a very good keyboard, which is good when you spend your time writing awkwardly long emails.
Android, since ICS, seems to be mature enough for most users. It's snappy (its multitasking, background apps and toggles mean you can do things faster than in an iPhone), does good resource managing and has a very good integration across the whole system. And, as some people have said, it's no longer ugly!
I understand if you'd prefer to not to mess with your phone and use the default install, but if you feel like getting your hands dirty g300.modaco.com is the place for alternate ROMS.
Best £70 (PAYG, but I guess there is still some operator subsidy in that price) I spent on a phone.
As a side note — do you too suffer of touch sensitivity problems? I feel it isn't as snappy as I'd like it to be, and there seems to be no workaround for it. Mostly around the corners, when typing on the keyboard, it might miss some keys and I have to press harder.
But I have stupid fingers, so, go figure.
It goes a bit further, because the "network stack" made by RIM is quite comprehensive, including some tweaks to the way they push information to devices, using operator infrastructure (I believe, I might be wrong here) resulting in a very battery-efficient system.
Because of this, RIM is responsible of negotiating with carriers across different countries, and this result, somehow, in the ability to sign up for sub-100$ / month roaming plans (in fact, it's 55$/month on roaming, pro rata, for me in Spain with a major carrier). Of course, it depends on your home carrier, some want you to keep paying an expensive price per megabyte —around 14$/MB when travelling outside the EU— and then some others let you use roaming as long as you're on BIS (so, no tethering), for a variable amount, or even included in the price for large enterprise plans. It varies depending on each operator and country. On the UK for example, MVNO giffgaff includes a small amount of complimentary roaming data, even for PAYG users.
On a side note, that also means you can tether to a BlackBerry PlayBook while roaming, which is fantastic. I have found roaming to be a bit slow-ish (around the speeds of EDGE even under HSPA), but for email and some random browsing, like reading the news while waiting for a flight on some random country, it is definitely worth it.
(And yes, the PlayBook sucks, someone thought it was a brilliant idea to just release and sell a device with a half-finished operating system — but it does the job.)
1. Toggling settings can be difficult. In Android, you have a pull-up/pull-down menu right from the home screen where you can just turn things on/off, like Bluetooth, sounds, WiFi, etc. In iOS, you go to the Settings app and scroll through the text labels and go through one or two more screens before achieving the same thing. And this, despite Apple's marketed UI simplicity.
2. The thing can't even send files over Bluetooth. How is that not possible in 2013?
3. Boring old homescreen from way back 2007, which displays an amalgamation of all the apps installed on my phone, not the apps I use the most.
Of course, whichever phone you end up buying is nothing more than a personal preference. However, I just think that saying Android is better than iOS has become more of a fact than an opinion these days.
I chose to install Widgetsoid - it places a couple of toggles directly into the notification drawer. I never got Airplane Mode to work, though.
I used Bluetooth for sending files for years with many of my older phones, and I find that ability still comes in handy from time to time.
Also, the Xbox 360 controller doesn't use Bluetooth, although the PS3 and the Wiimote controllers both use Bluetooth.
> The thing can't even send files over Bluetooth.
> How is that not possible in 2013?
Many times I wanted to send a picture, contact or a document to someone standing right next to me and couldn't do it because they had an iPhone (or Windows Phone). This is especially pleasant when you're roaming and it's a bigger file.
I think Google can still work on the default look, but I find Android to be very "clean" and quick to work with. Android feels much more like a real operating system. iOS is so restricted and there are many work tasks that I cannot do (e.g. mailing a dropbox file to someone).
Google Now is also amazingly good. And the fact that mail search actually works is a "small" bonus :P
Samsung has also implemented some cool features in the SGS3, like that the screen stays on as long as you look at it. They are just much worse at marketing it. Can you imagine how much Apple would have hyped a similar feature?
I imagine there are enough facts here that made someone like Apple or Google think it's a bad idea. I expect someone in the Samsung marketing department came up with this idea.
I think the way you have to see it is that you don't really think about the feature. Sometimes you are reading something and notice the screen isn't dimmed. Sometimes when you're reading the screen dims and you have to touch the screen to have it not go into lock mode.
Having used it in practice for a few weeks I can say it's a great feature. I would expect it to show up on iOS and the core Android distribution.
And no, of course if you're going to use your screen as a flashlight, it's not going to detect your eyes and stay on. If you're not willing to go to the marginal effort of activating a flashlight app, what mechanism do you propose they use to have the phone detect when you're using it as a flashlight-by-screen?
Instead I have to kick it to FileExplorer and send it from there. It's not ideal but its also not Apple's fault.
Have you seriously never used it before ?
Or am I missing something ?
Android's back button used to be incredibly inconsistent and hard to predict, but now there's a fairly well established standard for this, which is supported by the API (http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html).
There was even a full-length Google IO session on it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwGHJJYBs0Q).
It doesn't mean all apps follow the standard, especially those naievely ported from iOS. Even some Google apps don't always meet expectations. But the convention is mostly there now and just needs more adoption.
Agreed. Amusingly, the only apps that I ever complain about (whether for the back button or for general styling and functionality) are the ones that are clearly half-baked ports of iOS apps.
No wonder it looks terrible and doesn't seem to work properly - you're following all the best practices for the wrong operating system!
Few days ago I saw a friend of mine unlock her phone using facial recognition. I was amazed. She was surprised at my amazement. I feel lots of iPhone users have similar moments when they see their friends with android use "magical" looking features the iPhone is slow to adopt.
Facial recognition doesn't work for everyone nor everywhere. As you put it it's "magical" and when the next guy unlocks your phone with it's face it's also part of the magic.
It reminds me a lot of the same discussion was done for the Bump app, where just bumping two devices together transferred your contact infos. Magic. Except it might not be your contacts but the ones of some random guys bumping roughly at the same time at the next table, or a few kilometers from you. It was part of the magic too. It still worked out 90% of the time, but that's not a feature I'd feel stupid not to have when better, simpler and more reliable ways were available.
Android has really good basic things. I personally don't think shiny magical features are what's to be the most envied.
She did point out quirks like if her hair isn't brushed it may not work etc. It could well be that the technology isn't polished enough for Apple's standard but I know when I see an Android user use it, I walk away impressed and questioning why my iPhone can't do that.
I'd really prefer for a different unlock method all together. I'd like my phone to be locked in case its lost/stolen, but I'd like it unlock faster. It's be fine wearing a Bluetooth-enabled accessory (ring,tie pin, device secured to the shoes/belt/pants/wallet in some fashion) that would bypass the lock because I'm with-in a given radius to the device.
This Apple disease spreads elsewhere. I had to enter my username and password on their developer site, and some web developer at Apple had gone to great lengths to prevent you from pasting your password into the password field. (I don't know that password - it is stored in a password management program.)
I can't for the life of me understand why the Apple faithful put up with this nonsense.
For the latter Android has the concept of multiple users but only on tablets. It isn't that useful as you can't for example create limited access guest accounts, only full blown ones. And software can't be made accessible the new users unless they create a google account in order to access the play store, even if already installed. It also turned off face recognition for me.
The one thing Android did get right (but not perfect) is having a central account manager. Any service can add itself - for example the Github and Dropbox apps do. Any app (with permissions) can request access to accounts that require user interaction to confirm. However the app does not get a password, but instead a token that has to be periodically renewed.
Is there any way to quickly toggle between different languages?
You can also enable a language-cycling button which will appear left of the space-bar if you so please.
Both are definitely quick enough for my fancy.
Is that something people like so much? Whenever I've used an iOS device, it annoyed me. I much prefer the highlight in Android.
It used to be in Android until Apple made it a 1 billion dollar lawsuit and banned everyone else in the universe from implementing it.
Those bouncing lists. 1 billion dollar. And Apple is not a patent-troll. No siree.
Because if it's the first then it is just a hypocritical position. And if it's the second then maybe you don't understand the math. Size of lawsuit = Price per patent * Number of infringing devices.
It's because the number of devices sold is so large that it ends up being such a large lawsuit.
As a device Nexus 4 itself is not much better than previous - Galaxy Nexus. Display itself is much worse on Nexus 4 than it was on Galaxy Nexus.
After giving back Nexus 4 I thougth I'd try out living with Galaxy Nexus, which until now was my phone in the drawer. And, actually, though I was an iphonee for 4 years, Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2.1 is an awesome device.
Back button is something you miss dramatically on iphone after a detour to androidland. Sharing feature, Google Now, tiny things. I do not give a damn about configurability. There is a lot of stuff that I'd welcome into android world from ios, but other than that - I'm satisfied.
Such migration would be unthinkable a year ago. 4.2.x, though not that much different from 4.1.x, is mature.
No cables. No sync. No fucking iTunes. No computer required. Just internet. Done.
If you feel old-fashioned, you can also just copy files to your device as a standard MTP or mass-storage device using USB-cables, or copy to SD-cards.
As long as the music files are properly tagged you should have everything auto-discovered on the device.
Also I noticed some mistakes with generic album titles, such as "Unknown Album" - selecting an artist, then their album titled "Unknown" would usually play all the titles that don't have an album title, even the ones by entirely different artists.
That being said, it beats iTunes by miles.
I am using iSync on the Nexus 4 to sync to my iTunes. But it's not quite the same. And the nexus doesn't have star ratings, just thumbs up or down.
I use star ratings to delete music from library. 1 star = delete.
In 2008: "Why I switched from BlackBerry to iPhone" In 2009: "Why I switched from iPhone to give webOS a shot" In 2010: "Why I switched to Windows Phone from iOS" In 2011: "Why I switched to Android from iPhone" In 2012: "Why I switched from X to X because it doesn't even matter anymore"
I get that it gives perspective on the differences between platforms and devices, but these pieces can only be so narrow because it's only one person's perspective.
Everyone's needs are different; some people love customization and hacking their phone. Others get it to just conform to the majority. Some even get it because it's free.
Platforms evolve with different visions. The beauty of the era we are in is the fact that services like Amazon Cloud Player, Dropbox and Spotify let you be on whatever platform you wish without losing your "services".
Am I the only one who doesn't care what OS they use as long as texting/podcasting/web browsing/music is available?
The iPhone feels great in my hands because it's so small and the battery seems to be lasting for ages. I don't even feel like it's that old because it still has the latest OS and apps.
I'm enjoying the iPhone for now but I think it's mainly due to getting bored with the Galaxy. The Galaxy is due an upgrade in November and I think at that point I'll get a Nexus.
Edit: HTC Dream was used for 3 years roughly, from Android 1.1 until 4.0 ROM's started coming out.
The two things which keep me from moving to Android are: 1) My ~$500 or so in purchased applications. Vendors should allow a one-time return of purchased apps on one platform to get them for the other, or just give both iOS and Android licenses for the same price if there's a way to prove the phone belongs to the same human. Admittedly 99% of what I really care about is free or <$100 total (Kindle, 1Password, Facebook, web, email, ssh pretty much cover my use).
2) Lack of hardware platform security features on most Android devices (semi-supported on the S3, apparently, but I'd only ever buy a Nexus device). If Google developed a Nexus 4+, 7+, 10+ with apple or blackberry level hw security, I'd probably switch, particularly if there were a way for an enterprise to essentially replicate the Google Apps management of devices with a simple self-hosted server (i.e. root of trust being enterprise, vs. Google or Apple).
I had an Iphone 3 once i liked it very much. Now i have a lowly ZTE Aqua with Android 4.0.3 and i'm very satisfied. Tried an Iphone 5 at a store and Ipad's and found the UI, boring.
In my opinion, Apple's "chromed" UI is getting old and would really love something more fresh, either on iOS and OSX.
Can anyone speak to how well switching one iPhone to a Nexus would work in this type of senario?
Sample size: public transport users and eatery-goers...
Semi-related: I've dropped a pocketknife blade first on a Nokia E71. There's the tiniest scuff on the screen, that's it. (And it's still in active use. Remains the best phone with a keyboard ever built.)
Wish I could get my phone updated without rooting it. My friend's iPhone 4 (released June 2010) is now patched up to worked with group messages fine, but my EVO 3D (released June 2011) that's a year younger won't get any updates. Android fragmentation graphic info: http://cdn2.techanalyzer.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Andr...
http://itechbook.net/why-installous-is-showing-terminated-er...
