I watched the live blogging of yesterday's announcement of the iPhone 5, and this morning I'm getting a good chuckle out of all the Android fans' reactions. This one, for example, compares the iPhone 5's hardware to a menagerie of Android phones' hardware and finds that some manufacturers have had some of the same hardware capability for months (or years, in the case of screen size).
Big whoop.
What fandroids don't understand is that for a lot of people it's not about MHz, GB, and mm. It's about what you can do with those things, and how good that experience is. Yes, Ice Cream Sandwich has raised the bar, but sorry if you bought a phone a year ago because you'll never get to upgrade to it. And, comparing the experience of using iOS 5 (or iOS 6) to Ice Cream Sandwich, Apple's devices typically offer a better experience—the phones are more responsive to user input, the animations are smoother and faster, the apps support your tasks in more intuitive ways, and (for LTE phones) your battery lasts much longer.
This isn't to say that everything's perfect in iOS land, only that the comparison fandroids make is based on a different set of values. Fandroids enjoy having the biggest, or the fastest, or the newest. Usability and longevity are secondary concerns, and areas where Android still lags iOS.
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