For the past three weeks, I've been downloading apps at breakneck speeds. For the past three weeks, I've been enjoying battery life I didn't know was possible on a smartphone. For the past three weeks, all of my suspicions about Android inferiority have been confirmed.
To be fair, Android is good enough for most people. It makes calls. It texts. It supports a lot of apps. For the past year, I've been spoiled by studying technology and constantly comparing my Droid X to the latest devices (which isn't helped by the iOS-esque redesign of Android's Gingerbread update). Now I have the iPhone 4s, and it's decisively better than anything Android offered me. Here's why:
The iPhone 4s is considerate of your time.
Every action on my Android phone would come with 1-2 seconds of waiting. Unlock the phone? Wait 2 seconds on a black screen for the home screen to appear. Open an app? Wait 1 second for the app to start loading. Take a picture? Wait for the camera to start up. Then get frustrated with it as it crashes. Wait another 4 seconds for the camera to open and actually work.
The 4s doesn't waste your time like that. The screen is responsive to the slightest touch without lag time or clunky black screen moments. I know the 4s's dual-core A5 chip is responsible for that, but it makes me resent what amounted to hours of time waiting for my Android phone to respond over the past year.
The iPhone 4s gives you access to apps Android does not.
I'm a power smartphone user, always going over 2GB of data per month, so I care about apps. I got sick of the Android second-rate app market. It reminded me of that shady black market watch salesman cliche, as if someone was approaching me asking, "Hey, wanna buy an app?" But they weren't legitimate apps. He'd say they fell off of the back of an Apple truck. But they didn't. They were knock-offs.
See, for every awesome iOS-only app, there is an equally unawesome, watered down version for Android. Android users who want to play Tiny Wings have to settle for Dragon Fly instead, which lacks the metagame mechanics that make Tiny Wings so great. I dubbed picplz as "The poor-man's Instagram" shortly after downloading it because it lacked the critical mass and community features found on Instagram. Now, there's Iris, the Siri-inspired app that takes voice commands for basic tasks. But Iris isn't a virtual assistant. It can't schedule meetings for you or set reminders. It's a Siri knock-off, and it's a symbol for the whole Android platform.
The iPhone 4s battery is a boss.
In my Android days, I would charge my phone over night. By the time I completed my 45-minute commute, my battery would be at 60% power. If I didn't charge it at the office, the whole battery would only last about 3 or 4 hours. I know there have been a lot of complaints about the the iPhone 4s battery life (which has a software fix on the way), but compared to my Droid, this iPhone battery lasts forever! The first Sunday I had it, I was running several apps all day long checking fantasy football scores constantly. The battery lasted from 9AM to 11PM on a single charge. I was floored.
For the Masses...
Androids are phones for the masses--for the people who want a smartphone, but don't really need one. From my 3 weeks of field testing, I can definitely say the iPhone deserves its status as the standard for the industry, and it will always set the bar by which Android measures itself regardless of adoption.