[Android General] drakenabarion:
No os on any system anywhere is perfect. I just need to state that before I can continue. :-)

The biggest reason I do not want to use iPhone is iTunes. Many other things include needing to hack a phone to install non app store apps (much more than rooting on Android and is really a mess for most people to think about), lack of viable ui customizations, different push notification settings, and the inability to minimise apps.

For me, these are big issues. For others, they may not even think of doing anything other than phone calls. Its all about usage.

Smoothness is also about perception. And from my experience hearing from people who complain about smoothness, many obsess about things such as fps and benchmarks. In a pc game setting, the biggest benefit for having more than 60fps is because moving into more complicated game areas, the increased detail may affect the fps. However, so long as the fps is constantly about 30fps, you are not realistically going to notice anything (biological limit - the average human eye cannot notice much difference above 30fps but will notice even slight drops below it). In the setting of a ui such as a phone or a pc, most of the time, what is being rendered is very simplistic and on a 2d plain. The average fps of a high end gaming pc while running Aero in a web browser and while scrolling (I did this test with fraps) is about 10fps. And it runs smooth. (I kinda wrote this to discredit benchmark junkies as a controlled set of tests in a controlled environment can only tell so much).

It is different on a phone however. Things such as cpu and memory management play a factor and affect the time it takes to process the required information for display on screen. The gpu should be considered seperately as most of the time, it is not going to be pushed to its limit and just because something is being run on gpu does not mean it is completely free of the cpu.

When you consider the fact that iOS is very weak in its multi tasking compared to Android (and the other multi tasking mobile os' that I have less experience with :-P ), it should be little surprise if the GUI runs a little more responsively. Its sitting there babysitting one mainthread task at a time while fiddling around with misc activity like push notifications. I do not think it copes well with several app tasks at once.

My experiences with Android on my phone (i9000) was that it did not lag much after some fine tuning. Mobile operators put far too much junk on android phones and that affects out if box performance greatly. Personally, I use CM based roms and I only had lag in certain (uncommon to most users!) situations. Well stock CM7 browser was laggish but there are alternatives! ICS uses gpu for all GUI and since switching to ICS, the only time I get lag at all is when I bring up the recent apps.

And I have the freedom to do whatever I wish with my phone, from making it look like iOS (heaven forbid :-P ) to making it look more refined and comfortable.

Let iPhone fans enjoy their iPhones. It is suitable for them while it wasn't for me. I can say I am happy they are happy! Just don't be smug - iPhone isn't the be all and end all. Your phone isn't the social equal to diamonds or fancy cars (far too many people have it for it to be so significant)... But unfortunately yes, iPhone users can get smug and self important. Not all but I have met my fair share.

Here is a little joke I like to make about Apple:

"Microsoft Windows 95 slogan: Where would you like to go today?"

"Apple: You are going here today!"