I’ve gone through different variations of the Blackberry since they emerged on the market, also supplied by the corporate overlords. Up until now, it has been great for email and phone calls. However, nowadays a portable device need to be more than that. My contract ends this month and I am on the hunt for a new device. I’m leaning toward an iPhone but I could easily see myself sporting a Droid.
Droid 4 has been announced. I liked my Milestone (the international market version of the Droid) but at this point it was much too slow to keep up with my usage. If the Droid 4 has specs that are competitive with today’s market I’d take a serious look at it.
I’m now sporting a Galaxy Nexus. It’s got some minor, naggy design flaws but I’m very happy with it.
It’s also worth noting that Chrome Browser (beta) has been released for Ice Cream Sandwich devices. It’s not flawless but it is a super slick browser. I regularly end up with 6+ tabs open with no noticable slow down. There’s also an incognito mode in case you have to “take care of some business” in secret.
I got the new iPhone so far loving it . Gave up the android = thank you best buy
I’ve been using a Galaxy Nexus with the beta of Chrome and really love it as well. In my personal opinion, ICS is the first version of Android that truly gives iOS a viable competition for a powerful, elegant, and intuitive mobile device operating system experience.
And some day, my phone will have it too.
…waiting…
any way to make my phone batteries last longer?
Well, that depends. My phone (Galaxy S: Vibrant) was supposed to get updates too. Samsung barely got it to 2.2. They never bothered with Gingerbread and certainly won’t with ICS. If you have a Nexus S, or a phone that is less than 4 months old, I would say you’re likely to get ICS. But if not, I think you’re out of luck and you should probably shoot for something like Cyanogenmod (whenever they get 9 out)
I just got a Droid 4. Verizon says that they’ll update it to ICS when they’re ready, but for all I know they won’t be ready.
however, Droid 4 counts as “less than 4 months old” 
Just root your android phone and you can have any Android version you like. I am on the old version of HTC desire (bravo), and I can run ICS if I want to. The only thing1 is due to hardware driver issues, ICS’ camera app doesn’t work perfectly with desire yet, but it’s gonna get there sooner or later.
For now. I am happy running gingerbread in an ICS like theme, with DATA++ I never run out of internal memory (this device ) only came with 256mb!) and it runs smooth as ice cream.
I’m pretty comfortable futzing with a $500 or less computer, doing things that would void the warranty if I got caught.
Not so much with my $2000 (over 2 years) cell phone.
I know you can get away with it. I know you can restore it from backup. I also know that it’s not worth the risk just to have a nice browser, that I’ll use weekly at best and still wish I was on my laptop.
This is exactly how I feel about my phone. I don’t use a land line so 95% of the stuff in life that actually matters comes in via my cell phone. If my laptop dies I can’t fuss around on the internet for a while, which sucks, but doesn’t really hurt me in any realistic way. If I mess up my phone then the bank can’t call me or doctors or whatever. I’m the type of person who always answers my phone as well, and I can only imagine how crazy my Mom would go on the off chance she tries calling me for the evening I’m reinstalling software.
$2000?? If you already have the best available Android phone out there, or even a fairly new one, you probably have no need to root. But for us old Desire users with very little internal storage space, rooting is the only way to restore the phone’s functionality as a smart phone. Phones after the old Desire, such as Desire HD or Galaxy Nexus have more than 2GB worth of internal memory and vendors will upgrade the phone OS to ICS if it is not already ICS for free, so why mess with it if you don’t want to?
But for me, who actually download and compile Android from source, messing with my Desire is part of the fun. Besides, the phone only dies when your phone’s NAND gets messed up. Which happens anyway when you install apps to internal storage, when you save contacts to your internal storage, and the same applies to iPhone users whether he JB or not. NAND has a limited write endurance, and sooner or later, it’s just going to crap out on you…
When someone actually bricks their phone, it usually involves writing to the NAND and the write itself getting interrupted, either by power failure or some other reason. If it stops you from returning to where you can write to NAND again, then you are stuck in a state where you can’t rescue your phone. With Android, it usually happens when you can’t even get into the Bootloader anymore. With iPhone, you are pretty much screwed the moment your NAND gets messed up.
2 years is 24 months.
$90 a month for 24 months is right around $2000.
I could pay less and get less, but I’ve become fond of my unlimited data plan
Also, I have no home phone (saving, what, $20/month or $480 over that time span) and also don’t have cable (saving probably the rest) so, compared to most of America, I’m actually spending less on those 3 things put together.
The Caveat there is that you can install any version of android you like. There’s no real guarantee that it’s going to work well. You’re better off in the post root world if you happen to have a popular phone.
That said I just barely switched over to CyanogenMod 7.1, and the difference is UNBELIEVABLE. My phone is easily 4-5x faster. Animations are better/smoother, the phone has more options and overall just feels better. I’m amazed at how long I tolerated my phone as it was (and that was with initial improvements using a different ROM). It’s not just a better browser. It turns your phone into a super-tool rather than just money vacuum for your carrier.
I have only two arguments for not rooting:
- You’re nervous about your warranty. (It’ll be out after year one anyway.)
- You already have a Google Experience phone - even here there are advantages to be gained by rooting, they’re just fewer and far between.
I feel pretty confident that I will be rooting all my future android phones. It’s totally worth it.
With all that I said, now that I replaced by Droid 1 with a Droid 4, I fully plan on rooting my Droid 1 and seeing all the fun things I can do on it, using it just as a little wifi computer.
But with Mass Effect 3 coming out in a couple days, playing with old phones is going to have to wait
Droid 1 already has 512MB worth of internal storage, so chances are you don’t feel as pushed to root your phone as I do. But like sircastor said, the phone is amazing after rooting, only goes to show that the phone manufacturers didn’t do a good job optimizing their phone.
But that’s the benefit of having an open source community, who gives a how what Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple or even Google designs their phone or software, they shouldn’t even lock the phone to begin with. Imaging if you buy a computer and the BIOS is locked so that you can’t put another operating system on it, it’s our fraking computer and phone that we paid for, not anyone else’s and we should be able to install any software we want on it…
Since I’m on my second Android phone I may start fussing with 3rd party software. The trouble is my old phone is a Moto Milestone which, apparently, can’t be fully rooted. There’s still some room to play around with it, but it’s not as customizable as other phones. I wouldn’t mind turning into some sort of dedicated device, such as an mp3 player since it has SD card memory, unlike my new Galaxy Nexus which is all internal memory.
can’t be fully rooted? how so?
anyway, here’s a tool that offers one click root for Motorola Milestone:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803682
other Milestone resources such as tons of custom ROM and guides to how to root the phone
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=670
Back when I was looking into it, the Canadian release of the Milestone couldn’t have an actual root applied to it. You had to do some fancy work by doing a half install of the brazillian build of Android and this would allow a certain level of access, but you couldn’t fully root the phone without bricking it. Maybe the development has changed.