Android = Windows 98 experience

[Byrd]

Agreed re the ecosystem thing, albeit in this case you get freedom to do as you please and the price you pay is your every move is monitored.  In the ms and apple ecosystems you have no freedom and your every move is monitored.  On a more positive note, Ubuntu looks to be getting ready to pursue the smart phone and tablet market with its Unity interface as well, so there'll at least be other alternatives.  Regardless, none of the telco's behave ethically where your data is concerned and they work in close cooperation with the hardware vendors.

You do have freedom. You can develop a custom company application for an iPhone for example, it just wont be published via the app store.

[audiomuze]

^^^ I guess you're right, that's why it's necessary to jailbreak the thing in order to be able to access its innards, and why the only officially sanctioned way of getting music and/or videos onto it is via iTunes.  You're free to do f0kk0l other than make calls and use your bandwidth and time to connect to the itunes store.

[audiomuze]

Nice

[kamikazi]

Not buying another Samsung product until they jack up their firmware updates and support for older products. If you have a Samsung product older than 6 months don't expect any new updates. This tablet is shipped with Android 3.2 which means you will probably get one update to ICS 4.0 and then you are screwed once they work out all the bugs. Compare that to Apple with iOS. Samsung still have a lot to figure out.

[randomguy]

My 2c should anyone care to read it 

After using iPhones for 3 years, I wasnt too excited by the 4S announcement and decided to move to a Samsung Galaxy SII just to try something different again ( I had no prior experience with android).

While I DO love the device (the 4.3" Super AMOLED screen is incredible and the camera also resolves great detail in favorable light), I cannot help but feel that the hardware is let down by an operating system that is not quite there yet.

While Android shows a lot of promise, I think that part of the issue is optimisation for the different hardware platforms. Apple have a MUCH easier job optimising their operating system for their devices because they control all the hardware and the operating system doesnt have to run on the wide range of phones that Android has to.

I was very surprised and disappointed to see my Galaxy SII with a dual core 1.2ghz CPU and 1gig of RAM, cannot provide a smoother user experience than a 1ghz single core iPhone 4 for 512megs RAM. Even my 3GS running iOS4 gave me a very snappy and smooth user experience and this is a 600mhz CPU with 256 megs of RAM, quite staggering to think the operating system can be that well optimised to run smoothly on such old hardware. My Galaxy SII has frequent small lags between screens and opening apps, none of it is a train smash, but it just isn't what you expect from that much horse power. With all the hardware in place, this can only speak to software that hasn't been properly optimised.

All that said, perhaps ICS will be the be all and end all it's expected to be, personally I am skeptical... If Apple released a 4" iPhone I probably wouldnt think twice about switching back. However, I agree totally that to pull all the power out of an iPhone and to truly make it a device that can do all you want it to, you HAVE to Jailbreak.

[audiomuze]

Nicely put