In addition to above points:
- A simple, unified cloud backup system (iCloud)
- A simple, unified messaging system superior to SMS and transferrable to multiple devices and even desktop Macs (iMessage)
- Unmatched technical support and warranty services
- Unmatched OS upgrade support, with iOS 6 supporting four hardware generations, more than any other mobile OS platform.
- At the moment, the iPhone is THE fastest phone on the market.
- Arguably THE best camera for a smartphone in its class (with the exception of the Nokia 808 Pureview, but while the 808 is decent as a camera, it's absolutely horrible as a smartphone)
- Fully integrated social media "baked-in" to the OS (Facebook, Twitter, Find My Friends)
- Find My iPhone, and security features (remote lock/wipe) if your phone is lost/stolen.
- Siri
Here's the thing though: if you're interesting in picking a phone platform solely on ticking off specs and items, then you might as well get an Android device. Android, and its legions of fanboys, excel at making the platform look really good on paper.
Samsung pointed this out really well.
But the devil is in the details. So the Galaxy S III has NFC, for instance. Wonderful! So it's so easy to share content with my friends?... oh, wait... ONLY the ones who happen to also have Galaxy S IIIs. Not the Verizon Droid series, or any other Motorola Android users. Not the HTC One X users, nor the LG Optimus G users. Not even the ones who bought Galaxy Notes, or SIIs, another other non SIII device, even if its a Samsung.
Oh, and let's not forget that I kinda
don't need NFC to share my photos, videos, and other social content, because this neat invention called Facebook (or Google+, twitter, or flickr, or youtube, among others) lets me do much of the same things.. and my friends can use any smartphone, tablet or desktop/laptop they want, and don't even need to be right there, in the same spot with me.
Suddenly, the NFC doesn't seem so useful. Nor does ShareShot, or Group Cast, or Direct Call, or the dozens of other SIII-specific features that kinda run counter to the "Android is an open platform" idea, because, well, they only work on one that phone model.
Other Android phones have similar issues: they have features that are non standard, aren't taken advantage of uniformly when it comes to apps or otherwise across the Android platform, and that ends up limiting that feature's usability quite a bit. Remove all of those single-phone specific features, and you get stock Android, which doesn't have as much to offer against iOS except some added interface customizability, and some neat live wallpaper.
Unfortunately, Android's greatest strength continues to also be its greatest weakness: the base platform is so "open" that phone manufacturers and cell carriers (who don't really care about or even like "open") can come up with their own specialized, locked-down versions with non-standard add-ons that end up fragmenting the platform, leaving its users disjointed and uneven, and having to deal with cross-device conflicts and incompatibilities. So while an Android user can snark about how iOS users have to jailbreak to get full control of their devices, they've likely gotta hunt down the right custom boot loader to root their own, allegedly "open" device.