The official tablet (and other useless electronics) thread!

[G.Irish]

If I get an Android phone next, I don't want any TouchWiz or Sense or whatever. Just straight-up Android. On good hardware that isn't flimsy. With good battery life. So basically, not an S3. I don't know why people like this stupid thing. It's too big, physically, and the battery life sucks. The back casing is micro-thin and so is the screen. It feels like a toy compared to my iPhone.

So. Think I'll be able to find the mythical Android phone when the time comes? Or should I just keep drinking the Kool-Aid since it's been good to me since 2007?

If you buy outright you can get either the HTC One or S4 with stock Android. I think I can load stock Android on my TMo edition S4 but I haven't tried it yet.

The S4 feels a bit more sturdy than the S3 did, and even though it's a big phone, I think you'll like the fact that it is far easier to read on it. I read more articles on my S4 because it's not such a strain (I was coming from an iPhone 4 tho). With Swype i can type way faster than I could on my iPhone, to the point that I find myself doing things on my S4 that I couldn't be bothered to do on my iPhone.

So far the battery life on the S4 is pretty good. My only battery problem is that it doesn't charge anywhere near as fast as my iPhone did.

For my money, when it comes down to the choice of Android vs iOS, the fact is that Android is getting better at what iOS does well faster than iOS is getting better at what Android does well. All of the Google cloud services are integrated neatly into Android and the UI/UX is leaps and bounds better than it used to be. In several places I think the Android UI/UX is better (at least for stock Android).

On the other hand Apple's cloud services aren't much to write home about. Siri, Apple Maps, and iCloud just don't measure up very well to the Google counterparts. The UI/UX of iOS is still better in some ways, but now it's almost down to matter of preference.

The big place where Apple still has an advantage is in the selection of apps but at this point it's mostly games where Android trails. All of the serious business apps are on both.