[General Topics] gothpunk4christ:
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THIS IS AN OPINION THREAD. YOU MAY OR MAY NOT AGREE BUT THIS IS ALL OPINION!!!

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I usually get about 3 questions per day about my phone (Captivate) and why I picked it over an iphone. I'm a travelling warranty rep and so I'm on my phone a lot, and come across dozens of people a day with my line of business. This is usually one of the more frequet questions, and I decided I would just post this on my facebook as well.

I want feedback on this little short story I wrote about why I picked my Droid device over an iphone, and I figured this would be the best place to put it. I want feedback! Yes I am a little biased, but not without valid reason.

If you can actually point out a valid legitimate claim that I am at fault on, then please do so. :) That may be a little hard to do as this is just an opinion thread, and boy am I full of them. Flame or follow, go right ahead.

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Here's a quick comparison of apple vs Android software.

When Apple releases a new OS, whether a minor update or an upgrade, you have to wipe out all of your data (or rather, it does it for you). Of course, you can just sync your phone with itunes and then do a restore. Sure, it's easy enough.

The next thing is though, that when you do sync with itunes, you have to resync every single file and piece of music, each picture, etc, all over again, even after you've done it once. Considering all of those syncs I've done on others phones have taken well over 20 minutes to sync, for just a couple hundred songs and maybe 50 pictures, it's a pain when you want to go back and add ONE thing and have to do it all over again. Fun, huh?

There are other ways to go about adding individual files and such to iphones, but that involves jailbreaking and setting up custom networking interfaces with your phone, which typical iphone users wont know how to do.

Droid really has all that to begin with. Want to add a file? Just connect the phone to your PC via USB cable (I had 2 included with mine) and tell the phone to mount the storage, I did this by dragging down the menu bar and hitting one button that said "Select to copy files to/from your computer." That makes it show up in the PC as a standard flash drive or removable storage device. Add files accordingly, without having to spend 30 minutes syncing just to get one file. Drag, drop, and you're done.

Next, is jailbreaking. apple programs all of their OS's to fix exploits that have to be programmed in order to jailbreak their phones. If you have the newest version of apple software on your phone, chances are you'll be waiting for quite some time in order to be able to jailbreak. Then, IF the jailbreak is any good (and you don't brick -- or kill) your phone, you can generally unlock it (use it on a different carrier, which is usually the sole reason to jailbreak it) assuming they ALSO have a working unlock for it. You may be able to jailbreak it, but you wont always be able to unlock it.

There's a similar thing you can do for Droid phones, it's called rooting the phone. There's a very large difference though, in what is actually done. Jailbreaking an iphone basically requires new code to be injected into the software in order to bypass restrictions that apple specifically put in place to keep "malicious" software off of their devices. In other words, according to apple, jailbreaking is malware (something apple is supposed to be immune to also according to them). Jailbreaking is frowned upon by apple because it gives you power over your device to do things they don't want you to. Of course, you have to basically bust it out of jail (hence the term jailbreaking) in order to do so to free it from its bonds of restriction apple forces upon its devices. Rooting a Droid phone is nothing more than enabling administrator mode on your device. Its basically if you log onto your computer, you need administrator privledges to be able to do certain things... this is root. Root is a Linux term, basically meaning root controlls everything. No restrictions. Logon as administrator, and that is the same as root pretty much. No needing to jailbreak, no bonds needed to be freed, nothing. Jailbreaking = your friend is in jail, and you have to bust him out. Rooting = You're a CEO and you just took over the whole company. Root is God mode, jailbreaking is rescue mode. Got the difference? Good.

So what about Driods? When you flash a new OS (install an updated/upgraded operating system), does it erase everything? Well, in the past day I've flashed 3 different OS's including having gone back to the stock ROM that AT&T included with all their phones, rooted, unrooted, updated and reverted several times today and I have yet to lose any information. I haven't synced, backed up, done anything to preserve my data, and I've gone from 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.2.1 to 2.2 to 2.1 back over again and haven't lost a thing besides the call history and my text messages. And if I REALLY wanted to, I could have backed those up as well.

So what's all this about OS versions and everything? Well, if you're an iphone user, your OS version probably wont be anything more than a number and a couple of features, unless you jailbreak. Minor bugfixes and such, fixing exploits so people can't jailbreak as easily, and maybe adding a couple shiney new features and that's really about it. The flavor is, well, apple pie. The next version of the apple OS will still be apple pie, maybe with a little more cinammon. The next version will be apple pie, maybe with more apple. The next version will be apple pie and it may even include a worm, removed (or maybe even left in there) with the next batch. It'll always be apple. With Droid, there's not so much apple. I had an OS earlier today that was strawberry. My next was chocolate. After that was grape, then orange, then a giant chewy moist brownie with vanilla ice creamed drenched in chocolate syrup and whipped cream. With apple, all you get is pie. With Droid, you get eclairs, ice cream and more, and you get it how you like it. How about some Gingerbread now? There may even be pickled herring for those that want it later.

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Remember this was just an off the wall comparison, I didn't go as far in depth and be as technical as I'd like to have, but I did have to be a little redundant as most all of my iphone using friends need things explained to them several times before they understand. :) If I missed any points, feel free to share. Sorry if I hurt your feelings over anything (this was an opinion thread, remember?)