I just got a smart phone this summer... here's my story:
Work provides me with a phone. In June my old one (sprint/nextel Mortorola non-smart flip phone) stopped recieveing calls and my boss told me to go to the sprint store and get a phone that had reliable reception. I ended up with a choice between Iphone 4/4S or a Motorola Photon (Android phone) on the Sprint network. Got the photon because my purchasing guy wouldn't approve applecare insurance (which was $100 up front for 2 years, but was ok to pay $8/month for 2 years, which equaled almost double applecare. Oh well...). So, got it, took me a while to get used to it, but I did.
Fast forward to a month later... all our company's cell phones (45 mobile phone lines) wouldn't recieve calls. Sprint/Nextel said they were "retuning Nextel's Towers" which would be obsolete in January, as they are phasing out Nextel. So, we tried other phones from them, and none worked in all locations of our employees. So, we decided to switch providers to Verizon.
So, my boss said he could chose between Motorola Razor or iPhone for managers (my level). So, he got iphone 4's for us all, as we could get accessories and such pretty much anywhere. I was all excited to finally have an iphone. I got it and I hate it. I miss my android SOOOO much! Nothing is intuative, to me, anyway. I hate that it takes so many steps to silence my phone at night, when with the Droid, I just set the silent hours one time and it did it every night automatically, and turned sounds back on in the morning.
Things i miss from my Droid:
- silent hours
- custom ringtones for free - I could literally download it and set it as a ringtone. On the iphone, I have to go through itunes, if it's even the specific file format.
- not having to sync my phone via itunes or icloud (icloud doesn't even let you sync fully, so if you want a true backup and customability, like adding custom tones, you have no choice but itunes)
- Itunes is hard to control... if you have it on one machine, and you try to sync to another (which we've had to do when the one machine broke) it creates all sorts of problems.
- having a separation between my work life and my personal life on my phone
- having separate contacts in my phone - work, personal email contacts, phone contacts. on Iphone, they're all in one list.
- the ability to start typing someone's phone number and it'll bring up people who fit that... I have to start typing names on the iphone, and it's just not safe to do while driving. So, now I pretty much only initiate calls while at a light, which sucks.
- the big screen on my droid. The iphone is so small and fragile. I never even had any kind of case on my droid, dropped it, off the counter a couple times, it was unscathed. This thing... the phone guy scratched it when he was putting the case on!
- the BACK button. I HATE only having one button on the iphone. Every app has a back button, but they're all in different places. I miss having the home, back, menu, and search buttons all the time.
- having to close apps. really. it's annoying.
- calendars. droid just showed my google calendars better. the iphone only lets me see a few days at a time, where the droid - I could see a week at a time and i could read it all. And right now, my iphone won't display all 4 of my google calendars although I've told it to over and over and over again.
Things I like about the iphone:
- accessories are everywhere. I can probably buy an iphone accessory, (charger, case, screen protector) at the freaking gas station! I know for sure that Meijer, target, etc. will have a large selction. And if someone makes a cell phone case, 99% of the time, it's for the iphone, and iphone only.
- apps - they seem more reliable/better developed than Droid apps. More professional. But less of them are free.
- camera - it's pretty nice in that I can chose my focal point. Don't get my wrong, the Photon had a nice camera too, with higher resolution, but the iphone camera, although less megapixels/resolution, just takes better pictures. the flash is better too, for sure.
- Facetime. I have yet to use it, but I like that I'll be able to 3-way "skype" with my sister and parents, since they all have iphones, for free. We had Skype before but we could only talk to one other party at a time for free.
- organizations of apps - I like the little folders I can categorize my apps in. On my droid, I had different screens for different uses, such as games, work stuff, Disney stuff (yes, I had a whole screen of Disney apps, and now I have a square folder thing-y of them).
- it's commonality - because the iphone is so common, if I don't know how to do something, I can generally find out by asking someone else who's had one for a while, or I can always ask at the geek bar or whatever it's called at the apple store.
and for me, this is telling... at both the Sprint store and the Verizon store... all their employees and managers carried Droids. When I asked them if they had iphones, they all said that yes, they had tried them, but liked Droids better, even though they had to pay for them, and they cost the same as iphones.
good luck with your decision. I wish I could go back in time and convince my boss to have gotten us Droids. I was fooled by the popularity of Iphone, but in reality, the Droid would have been a better fit for me.
Sorry so long-winded, but I hope my experience helps shed some light on your decision.
)
Since I am not in a rush (I do like my current phone, an LG android) I will wait until the Iphone 5 comes out and will take it from there.
