Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Android Tops 50%, iOS Hits 30% in U.S. Smartphone Installed User Base
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
No, you are wrong. The "majority" choose android phones because most android phones are either buy one get one free or all free. There are android phones thats even more expensive than iPhones, but that's a drop in the bucket. The majority want a cheap phone that look and act like an iPhone. that's why the majority choose android.
this comparison is irrelevant.
* It's AT&T 4G - aka BS. No LTE.
* iPhone screens have high pixel density but their resolution is lower than that of Android phones (1280 x 720 on a number of models)
* You can play 1080p video on a 2x2 pixel screen by the way of downsampling. That's what iPhone does. What you actually see is not a 1080p video.
* iPhone does not support any memory cards. It does not even have a file system which would be required to mount an external storage.
* iPad 2 has 1GHz A5 CPU. In iPhone 4S this CPU is clocked at 800MHz (Link)
----------
Could you provide a relevant one? The one that would show that Apple is still competing in the high-end market? And no, sales do not qualify a phone as a high-end market, Specs do.
Things that matter to anyone:
* iPhone doesn't have LTE, the folks in an LTE area care about this.
* iPhone battery life kicks the pants off the LTE-sporting Android phones. My phone can download a hell of a lot more video over a fast 3G connection than my friend's LTE android phone.
* iPhone / iOS performance kicks the pants off every cost-competitive Android phone. Who cares about specs? I care about responsiveness and experience. Even Samsung's ads show how the user flicks their finger, then the Note thinks, then it reacts. There is a fundamental flaw in the Android UI stack which causes this.
* The iPhone retina screen is ****ing amazing looking. It's not 5" or 7" diagonal, and thus doesn't need to sport "true" HD resolution. 7" "phones" without 1080p or larger resolutions look like pixelated crap next to an iPhone, so I can see why it is necessary. But I'd rather have a phone I can carry around everywhere than a min-tablet monstrosity.
* Front-facing camera is low-res. On the other hand, the rear-facing camera, the one most people use to take pictures of people and places and things aside from their sexting pictures, is ****ing amazing, and blows the doors off higher-specced cameras on every other phone I've seen.
* No memory card support? Why would I want this? I've known many people who have had phones with memory cards - a Treo and a Blackberry, personally - and NO ONE has ever done anything other than buy a memory card when they bought the phone, installed that memory card, and forgot about it. The artificial wall every other phone puts between the "removable" card that is never removed and the internal memory always causes issues. I'd rather buy a phone with a single mass of 64GB of internal storage that I never have to worry about, and which phone doesn't have to constantly worry about what it will do if I decide to pop the memory card out two seconds from now.
Aside from LTE and possibly a front-facing camera, there isn't much there. What Android DOES have is "choice" - in form factor, etc. The bad side of that is that while some choices are real, you also have a false "choice" of which manufacturer X carrier "customization" you want to buy, none of which have the market prevalence necessary for them to get real UI attention, and which micro-market of external peripherals you will restrict yourself to, and which build quality surprises you'll come across six months down the road, and which no-updates-of-the-OS surprises you'll come across eight months down the road, etc.
A massive percentage of consumers do not understand value. They can't invest or even budget decently, but instead run up their credit card balances so that the bankers get most of their money in interest. Not much profit left in them for any high quality device manufacturer.
It would be nice if these people were teachable about the concept of investment value. But I'm not holding my breath.
The reason some Droids have higher res is because they have a larger screen. Higher res is not needed on an iPhone at all. The 1080p video is shown in 1080p if you connect your iPhone to an HDTV. The CPU is 1GHz according to this. You can connect cards to the iPhone using dongles like this.
And I don't get what the deal with 4G is. It shows 4G on the iPhone, and it is actually faster than 3G. However, people say it doesn't have 4G... It seems like the truth is that it has 4G, but not the same thing as the iPad. It's not LTE, it's HSPA+.
It means exactly the same to both geeks and non-geeks - faster and better phones.
I was thinking the same thing; how could an iOS upgrade add this capability?? It's not actually LTE, but it's some other thing that can be called "4G".
----------
Faster, yes, but not better. In fact, the faster processor with more cores just uses more power while not really improving the experience at all. Also, those specs are not correct according to the first result on Google when I searched "iPhone 4S specs" (besides the Apple.com results).
Also, I'm assuming Android NEEDS more RAM because it is Java-based, not Objective-C.
I think you are seeing the "4G" because of the iOS 5.1 update due to HSPA+ support on AT&T. Before iOS 5.1 the AT&T iPhone would show "3G".
Problem is they've sort of have been trying that for a while now. They can't keep going down this track forever or what Amazon did will become more and more common.
Edit: and as far as iPhones and "4G" that icon appears when you're on AT&T's non-EDGE, non-LTE network regardless of whether you're actually on the HSPENDKLHDJKHS+ network (or whatever they call it) or on the older 3G network. Basically, AT&T somehow got Apple to BS for them (and Apple should be ashamed).
Hmmm, trying to reason with a... Now how was that put. I remember now, an "irrational obsessed fanboy", that's it. LOL!
HSPA+ is based on existing 3G tech, and it allows a quicker, lower cost deployment vs. LTE. 4G has a minimum speed requirement for a protocol to be classified as such, and since HSPA+ has a speed that theoretically falls into that range, it can be called 4G. I believe the ITU who defines such standards has also classified H+ as 4G, but there are definitely some folks who think if the underlying tech is based on 3G standards, regardless of the speed, it should still be called 3G (or the 3.5G you see knocked around).
[edit]
Sorry, I meant to add: if your provider has deployed H+, and you’re using a 4S in that area, and you get your 4G indicator, it’s going to be ~2x (maybe 2.5x) faster than a non H+ phone like a 4 in the same area. LTE is significantly faster (go check out some of the throughput numbers in the iPad section on new LTE devices, it’s kind of crazy).
Last edited:
To any manufacturer, including Apple, what matters is maximum return on investment. Same with me. I want to get as much $ per hour as I can.
----------
Absolutely nothing! All we care about is how well it provides the benefits we're looking for.
Short-term, yes, but you need to have a good market share or else the low market share itself will cause lower and lower market share until nobody uses it. Apple is not in a danger zone at all, though.
My point was that you have to include tablets and other mobile devices in the iOS vs Android market share if you want a more direct measurement of "who is going to win?".
EDIT: Why is this text grey?
----------
Actually, as an investor in Apple products, I don't want people to know about this. If everyone bought an iPhone then sold it after 2 years, the used iPhones would be worthless
. You gotta beat the market.But it would be nice if people would stop messing everything up with credit card problems.
this is simply because people that cant afford iphones go out and buy a $10 prepaid POS android phone....
They THINK they can't afford it. Actually, iPhones go up in value as they get older because by then, the 2-year contract is done. They're actually worth a lot on eBay ($400 to $600) without the contract. So you actually end up spending less per year than if you bought a Droid.
Yeah, I can't wait for my 4S to be out of contract. It's the first iPhone I've owned.
4G is coming soon and which android phone has a quad core cpu? the "retina display" is HD,the iphone does not need 1 GB of RAM so why waste time putting it in,Who cares for the front facing camera i mean I only use it for FaceTime,And seriously memory card? the iphone comes in 16 GB 32GB and 64GB why do you want more
plus MHZ does not matter the SOC architecture is more important,you can have a 3 GHZ pentium but it wont be as good as a 1.8 core i5
Wow.
I know there is some smartphone OS ego stroking going on in this thread (on both sides) but there are people out there who can not afford expensive handsets which are in turn tied to expensive service plans
For those peoples sake, thankfully they have access to those "$10 prepaid POS android phone(s)".
Its nice that the iPhone has a great resale value but if the monthly outlay for a service plan is crippling to someone's budget, resale value won't help those people one bit.
Yes. Some number of developer are under this delusion. Then they find out that the vast majority of those Android users do not spend anywhere near as much money on apps as do iPhone owners. Most of the developers who stay with Android have to stuff their app cr*p-full of ads just to make anything. Most developers who want to pay the rent, and more, go back to spending most of their time on iOS apps. It shows.