iPhone 6 vs any Android

I have simultaneously used an iPhone and an Android for many years. Two pockets, two phones, two carriers. Verizon Android and T-Mobile iPhone in the USA Tuenti iPhone and Vodafone Android in Europe. But for a long time, my favorite phones had been Androids. Until this month Androids could do many things that iPhones failed at. You had a wide choice of size and my favorite screen dimensions were around 5′ bigger than any iPhone. Sharing on Android was much better, you could share any service with any service, iPhone picked winners. Android allowed WiFi apps like our own Fon app, iPhone did not. Some phones like the Samsungs came with replaceable batteries and by 5pm every iPhone I had was dead. So were the Samsungs but I could change the battery. Lately Samsungs like the S5 became waterproof and that was awesome during the summer. And then there was SwiftKey, the multilanguage keyboard that read my mind (because it read my Gmail), the keyboard that could guess whatever word was coming next in whatever language, the keyboard that spared me from having to use that horrible language changing globe of the iPhone clearly designed by monolingual people. But I still carried iPhones. The iPhones I used for other reasons. One, a big one is design. They were always the best looking phones. I just liked them as objects. Video and photography, no matter what Android makers did, they could never beat the iPhone neither the photo apps nor the cameras. And games of course. So many more games and better games for the kids. In general almost every app looked better and worked better on the iPhone. But what good was all this if the iPhone would be too small to type in, would only work with one language at a time and its battery would die by 5pm?

Well I am here to report that my new iPhone 6 is the first phone since Android became competitive that beats any Android I now have. And currently I have an HTC M8, an S5, a Moto G, and a OnePlus One which is a very special yet buggy high end Android phone. Yes I am still hesitant about the non replaceable battery in the iPhone 6, I will have to test it will, see if I can last all day. But the iPhone 6 at 4.7in is the perfect size, it is incredibly beautiful, thin and light, it abandoned the “we are better keyboard dogma” and got SwiftKey, it allowed WiFi profiles that are almost as good as WiFi apps for Fon, it came with 128GB of memory so I can get a large supply of Spotify extreme quality songs and all the games for the kids they want. Before I used to always be on an app diet, especially with the apps for Leo (7) and Mia (3), games that take over 1GB each. Now we can app binge and then put them on a game diet, but with choice. And the iPhone 6 is far superior at video and photography. After the iPhone 6, iPhone it is now. Will continue to use Android and iPhone but my time on phone ratio will radically shift towards iOS. Having said this, I don’t want to end without bringing a key factor here and that is cost. The iPhone costs $850. Yes $850 forget about those rip off offers with contracts, that is what it really costs, what Apple gets. And for $129 you get a an unlocked, no contract Moto E. A Moto E is not 15% of the phone an iPhone 6 is. If you, like most of humanity, are a person who lives on a budget, the Moto E is 80% of an iPhone 6 for 15% of the cost. What Android has that Apple never will, is the ability to bring 84% of humanity to the Internet. And for that we should thank Google. Even a low end iPhone costs 4x as much as a Moto E. And this is why iOS is only in 11% of all smartphones sold in the world right now. Moreover Android still rules at sharing, first it gives it OS at no cost to others and that is why their phones are so much more competitive, but also I love the way Android allows you to share from anything to anything. I find it impolite that Apple picks winners and losers by greatly limiting sharing among its preferred services.

Still even Google (trends) will tell you that with 11% global marketshare, iPhone is always more news than Android.