I was pretty surprised today to see a blog post today by Copy2Contact with a 5th grade playground "my Dad is bigger than your Dad' post taking sides in the iOS vs Android debate. I mean, really? What kind of business potentionally alienates, on purpose, half of their customer base with nonsense unrelated to their core product? Choice can't be left to choice?
But as I read their post by an unnamed author I was stunned at the amateur arguments and opinions-disguised-as-facts approach to the blog post. As a personal customer of Copy2Contact back when it was Anagram (and still a customer today), I found myself, for the first time since they acquired me as a customer, thinking "who are these boneheads?" And for importantly, would I give them any more of my money with this kind of amateur nonsense? That is a bit harsh, but seriously, read their piece and decide for yourself. I HOPE that this was a bait piece, in an attempt to simply draw traffic to their site. If they actually employ someone this void of deductive reasoning skills then heaven help them.
My house has the following: 5 iPods (1 original and 4 Touch's across 3 generations), an iPad 1, an iPhone 4S, 1 Android tablet and 3 Android smartphones, plus two laptops and a desktop. I get technology.
So forgive me while I roll my eyes at an author that admits just starting to "dabble" (his word) in Android this year and then goes on to lecture us about the two platforms and superiority of one of them. Reminds me of the 50 First Dates mentality. Live with both options for a couple years and then come back to us with an opinion that is relevant.
Now, let's dissect this blog post piece by piece and decide for yourself if you want to do business with a company this insanely shortsighted about their opinions on technology.
This author believes in being "open-minded when it comes to technology." And then he proceeds to use his experience in "dabbling" in one type of technology as the basis for his self-important declaration about the superiority of the one he prefers. Pure nonsense.
He compares using Android to using Windows (vs Mac) and reinstalling the OS countless times or tinkering with anti-virus software. Well, I get to live with 4 post-iOS5 devices that WILL NOT upgrade the OS via USB on an Intel i5 with 8 GB RAM. They won't. They wipe the devices, then fail, all of them (WIPED), EVERY time, with a USB error that Apple swears is the computer's problem. Nevermind the GPS devices, Android devices, printers, external drives, my Fitbit, 2 digital cameras, and my kids talking donkey toy, all of which don't seem to have a problem with that same computer and that same USB port. But you are probably right. It has to be my computer's problem. Sure. And I am sure it was user error when I had to put my iPad and 2 different gen2 iPod's in airplane mode and back to get the WIFI to work after the device was dormant for awhile.
"For users that want to have the best phone possible, Android’s deals with half a dozen different manufacturers makes that impossible." I simply cannot make sense of that statement. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Here is my sentence: "For users that want to have the best phone possible the user walks into the store and buys the best phone possible." Manufacturers make cheap garbage phones and they make rock stars like the Galaxy S3 or Galaxy Note 2. If you want the best phone possible YOU BUY IT. If I want a Galaxy Note 2, the fact that there is a cheap Chinese android phone for sale in the next aisle MEANS NOTHING TO ME. This is just a bonehead comment.
Then he follows it up with this whopper: "there is a good chance a better version of your Android phone will be released by a different manufacturer within weeks or months of your purchase." Um, no, not really. There was 1 year between the original HTC EVO and the Samsung Galaxy. It took 2.5 years to get from the original Galaxy to the Galaxy S3. Several high end Motorola devices came out in that year (YEAR, not week). The Galaxy S3 has been out for 10 months now and there is no apparent successor yet. The Galaxy Note 2 came out 10 months after the S3 and 1.1 years after the Note 1. This comment is factually inaccurate and ignorant. What was the lifespan between the iPad 3 and the iPad 4 by the way?
"Want to upgrade your iOS 5 to iOS 6? No problem." Oh really? Want to explain to us how to upgrade my iPad 1 to iOS6? Please. Hear that? It is called fragmentation in iOS. Now, without question fragmentation in Android is more robust but spare us the idea that it is non-existent in Apple land. Oh and thanks for the iPad fragmentation too, otherwise known as the "press this icon to blow up your app 2x because we don't have another strategy until the developer writes a different app specifically for this device." Fragmentation. Look it up.
I love this one. In his discussion comparing app stores, he says "But when you go into the Apple store, you never get malware." Really? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/first-ios-malware-found/ What is that you say? Yes, it is malware in the app store. Yes, real, factual, credible information FROM JULY. More flat out factual inaccuracies from this writer.
"I’m big on securing business data and the lack of checks in the Android environment simply puts your data at too much risk." What an amateur. First of all, connecting an Android smartphone to a corporate Exchange server gives the Administrator complete control over the device. Has this author even READ the permissions that are granted when an exchange server connection is initiated on the device for the first time? Obviously not. But let's not stop there. Here is a cute article *FROM 2010* about the Device Policy feature set added to Android in version 2.2 (yeah, 2.2). (http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/administer-control-android-phones-with-google-apps-device-policy-app/). Let's also not forget about one of many third party security solutions that can be added on top of these other two things AT THE USER AND COMPANY's DISCRETION. Do you understand the word discretion? It means the USER AND COMPANY get to decide - not Apple.
Next, on to the rant about the "junk" in the app store when entering a search by app function instead of app name. For kicks I entered the search "take notes by hand." I searched the Google Play store. I got 1000 results and the first ten were: Handrite Note Free, Antipaper Notes, ListNote, TT Note, Free Note, Jotter, Note Stacks, My Script, Jot It and Notebooks. But it really does piss me off that I had to jump over all of that garbage to find the few apps that were really relevant to what I wanted to search for. Damn you Google. And I am just SURE that the first 3 of 4 of those are actually Chinese hackers that will steal my thumb print from the phone the next time I touch the screen.
In the Apple store I got "No results for "take notes by hand."" But I am sure that I just didn't "search right." At least Apple was there to protect me against downloading a non-approved app for taking notes by hand. I feel protected now.
"Every phone is also preloaded with a ton of bloatware from whatever manufacturer you chose." Um. No. Try this press release from *A YEAR AND A HALF AGO* when Sprint announced removal of preloaded apps on current phones and no more preloaded apps on future Android phones. http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/announcements/blog/2011/07/08/did-you-know-sprint-allows-removal-of-most-preloaded-apps-on-htc-evo-3d But, I am sure that in a year and half you just didn't have time to read that press release. You likely were still pondering the deep thought that went into this blog post. This is a CARRIER decision, not Google's decision. Really? Are you that uninformed?
And I LOVE this one: "Searching for ways to get my Android phone to work the way I wanted, I headed straight to Google, where the only suggestions were that I “root” the phone. Is it too much to ask that the phone be ready out of the box?" Notice no examples were provided? Hey uninformed blog author: give us three example of ways you can make your iPhone "work the way you want" without jailbreaking that you cannot do on an Android phone without rooting? Just three. Go.
Then we get to the "iOS is far more intuitive" comment. You know, an opinion that is stated as a fact without providing any examples? Here is an example of that intuitiveness. Just suppose I want to do something nuts like send an email to someone and attach any file on my phone, whether in internal memory, or the SD card and send it to someone. I know - that is far out. How is that working out for you on your iOS device? Just browse to the SD ca.....oh, yeah, nevermind. Well, browse on your internal memory for the file that you transferred to your iPhone by hard connecting it via USB and performing a full phone synchronization (you know, like you did on that Palm Pilot device in 1994). Oh, I know, you didn't want to transfer the 1GB movie from iTunes right now in order to transfer that 50KB work related file, but iTunes knows best, right?. So go ahead and open your email program and attach that document. What? You mean that document type isn't one of the Apple sanctioned document types that you can attach to an email? OK. Well Apple must know best. That can't be an important file type to begin with then. Go ahead and change what you needed to do because it was clearly wrong. See how intuitive that was?
And then he closes with the predicable "battery life and speed" comparison. Except that the two blogs referenced were written in September. Better recheck the phones that are referenced as the "fastest" and the "most battery life" since it is almost three months later.
This Apple vs Android war perpetuated by these ridiculous bloggers is nonsense. To each his own and that is why we have personal choices. Imagine the ego that it takes to declare one's personal technology choice as superior to anothers. Add to that the factual inaccuracies noted above and you've got a bad case of a guy that seems to be trying really hard to find an audience for attention.
