"Android ICS already offers more than what is coming in iOS 6" (opens in new tab)

I... Hate... This... Phone...

And here I could deliver a scathing rant about the camera locking up the phone and refusing to properly focus. Or I could go on about the constant gmail, navigator, and browser crashes, the horrid battery life (even in 3G with the "extended" battery) and yeesh I'll just stop here...

And don't get me started about my Galaxy Tab 10.1 still stuck on 3.2 6 months after the release of ICS.

So why did I buy the Nexus? Because I figured the much-vaunted 2011 google phone would get great support. But if this is the best they can manage, sign me up for a Windows phone. More realistically, I'm going IOS on the next spin. Android is dead to me.

Perhaps I am lazy, perhaps I am somewhere in between those two archetypes you mention. I want to hold the device i buy before i buy it, as such i need to go to my provider store and see it, dare i say, touch it. This fact alone eliminates the option of seeing the nexus variant.

You don't have to follow the Techrags or details to want the latest and greatest.

Because the Nexus has been getting pretty mediocre reviews and none of the Nexus variants really interest me from a hardware point of view.

Do you know how much of it will be enabled? (e.g. will it have Siri working out of the box?)

(Genuine question, btw.)

My point is the average user isn't sitting there with their Galaxy-Titan-whatever in their hands feverishly checking what version of Android they're running and yelling "Where is my ICS!!" They're posting to Facebook, emailing, tweeting, searching for restaurants..etc

It's all about features.. and the fact is that iOS6 is catching up with Android 2.2... not 4.0

Keep in mind the problem of vendor recalcitrance is much less of an issue for an interested Android user. You can literally reflash your phone to a mod with an app from your phone. You don't even necessarily need to plug it in to anything.

It's pretty important to user satisfaction that Joe can say to Sally "You have an iPhone, right? Check out what they can do now!" And Sally be able to say "Mine does that too? Awesome!"

As opposed to Android, where Joe and Sally can barely help one another through the various UI skins half the time, let alone share enjoyment in cool new software features on devices purchased mere months apart.

(Sure, with iOS there are updates and features that don't get patched into older devices. But those situations are vanishingly few compared to Android.)

So, as an answer to the various times this question has been posed in this thread: Yes. It's a big deal to normal users that reasonably contemporary devices behave the same and generally have the same software features. And it's a very big deal for them to find out they bought the 'wrong' phone, not six months ago, because they got a model that will likely never get the cool new software feature their friend just showed them.

The degree to which updates don't matter, is the degree to which the users are barely interested in the device at all and use them as little more than a flip phone with better email and browser.

Which, while accurate for a certain population of users, hardly supports the relevance of any possible Android feature advantage.

I would argue that as new features in newer versions of operating systems become more and more of a spectacle that people everywhere, not just geeks are watching, Pushing major OS updates becomes more and more important.

If you're going to show off a new feature to the world, it's nice if most people can actually get at it.

I can't agree with that. Many felt that way in 2006 and definitely turned out not to be the case.

Even depending upon CyanogenMod has failed me. T-Mobile loves getting non-standard devices and then not releasing drivers that could help boost their own popularity - likely for IP reasons. I have owned dev phones in the past, and this was my first consumer device, and coincidentally the first Android device that I could not easily unlock and update on my own.

No, you can't compare a first gen Android device, but you sure as hell can compare a device more powerful than some netbooks.

Chances are iOS6 will have a higher percentage of iOS users than ICS of Android users after the first day or so.

I've stuck with the Google reference models since the G1, and while I'm usually behind on "what's new" (I'm currently on a Nexus S, while the Nexus Galaxy has been out for awhile now), my wife is constantly buying the 'new' Android hotness, and is perennially jealous of my phone, even when it's older and has less features.

I get the software updates faster, everything works, and nothing has been mucked with, ala Blur or whatever. Meanwhile her phone is dual core, has HDMI out, and is better on paper, but crashes often, becomes unresponsive and lags on Android updates.

edit: the -> your (I know the point of updating the 3GS, I don't understand the OPs point in its attempt to mock Android)

iOS's design is much more dependent on Apple implementing core features and interactions (I suspect this is partly by design). The benefit of this is that when Apple does implement them, they are incredibly well done and have that glossy Apple finish that Apple does best.

Android's design allows heavy integration—or sometimes outright replacement of—all sorts of core OS features by third party developers.

Case in point: Google Maps on Android is just a regular app. It's not built into Android (though it does ship by default on basically all Android phones). It receives updates regularly from the Play Store outside of Android's infrequent OS updates. Just being a regular app, however, doesn't prevent it from connecting itself into all sorts of actions throughout Android. You click on an address in a third party and it'll open in Google Maps (or any other third party app that registers itself to handle the "map an address" intent). You speak "Navigate to Starbucks" into Voice Actions and Google Maps will open.

If you want to use a different browser on Android (Chrome for instance) you just install it and make it your default browser (which is an option you get the first time you try to open a link after you have installed it). Want to open reddit links in a reddit specific app? After installing your favorite you'll get the option to always open reddit links in that app (apps can register to handle specific url patterns).

People talk about how you can Share using third party apps on Android but that's really just the tip of the iceberg that the Android Intents system allows. The Intents aren't even just a limited set defined by Android itself. You can create new Intents that the Android developers never envisioned and now your app seamlessly integrates with any number of other applications making use of those Intents. It's a beautiful system.

So while iOS users sometimes have to rely on Apple to add functionality (like Twitter or Facebook), Android users often don't require anything but the third party developer to implement it. I believe this is why fragmentation seems to be a lot bigger of issue to some vocal iOS users than it is to many actual Android users. That's not to say that it isn't an issue, just that it isn't as big of an issue as they might expect from their experience with iOS.

"So you have hardware accelerated video filters? Well look at what I can fetch, hack and compile my Gentoo into.."

I'm not saying Android is bad, but this znet post is just stupid, sorry. Apple has never really been a big inventor of new technologies (apart from industrial design), but integrating existing ideas as good as possible. Some people prefer to tinker on their smartphones, some people like me get enough tinkering on their desktop PC and like their notebooks and smartphones to "just work" (quoted because it's actually not always like that with Apple products anymore, but at least their iOS devices are pretty solid in what they do).

People care "how they get there" when the phone they purchased a month ago can't run a cool new app because the manufacturer or their network provider decided they should be using a 2 year old version of android and that upgrades are not allowed.

That's exactly his point. Even if others offered the feature first, it's what's behind the bullet list that makes it a successful product (polish, if you will).

Apple wasn't first with the iPhone or iPod, but they sure as hell changed the product landscape after they released them.

This assumption that before-after implies cause-effect is one of the worst logical fallacies.

Microsoft was first to mass market tablets. So Apple "copied" them 10 years later, and somehow succeeded where Microsoft failed? Microsoft invented the idea of a tablet-like computing device?

Google invented the idea of a notification system? Of turn-by-turn navigation?

Dictation on the iPhone under iOS 5 is shockingly better than dictation on Android ICS on my Google Galaxy Nexus.

I can carry on a complete SMS conversation via voice on iOS without editing, while having to edit every other phrase on ICS.

My point is that 'Android (ICS) already offers more...' is hunky dory... Thing is: then you need to use Android.

I was taking a little jab at Android because I'm annoyed that fans of the platform always seem to make ironic claims as to the ease and openness of it.

It's not easy to hack and distribution is a mess... etc.

Disclaimer: this post contains opinions, responses may contain nuts.

You can pick whatever phone you want, and install whatever android you can get working on it if you want, if you want ota upgrades in a timely manner you need to pick a manufacturer / carrier that does that, which is only google devices at the moment, thats specifically because it is so open.