Why didn't you just buy a Nexus? (i used to battle Android updates to, but it's not Google's fault... The Nexus proves that) (1st smartphone was a iPhone 3GS, the rest were all Androids)
I'm trying really hard not to start a flamewar, but as someone who has exclusively used (and still uses) Android since the first Moto Droid, Google cannot be trusted, even with the Nexus brand. Take the Galaxy Nexus as evidence, where a similarly aged iPhone was still receiving the latest iOS updates. Or take NFC: Android users have been quick to mock Apple for using NFC, but every time I asked a clerk at the one store nearby that supported paying via a phone and NFC the clerk had never seen it used. Google doesn't tend to "finish the job" for lack of better words.
With respect to the grandparent and the "Fighting", I have to agree with the grandparent. There is NOTHING NEW in the iPhone 6 and yet I'm thinking about getting it and making it my first iOS device because I'm sick of fighting everything from updates to not having the latest apps (which are iOS first usually https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332000#up_4332278). The same thing happened with me and Linux as a desktop OS after years of use: http://xkcd.com/619/
To be honest, my Nexus 5 is the first device that is good (to me) right out of the box.
I've installed Cyanogenmod on every Android device before and Cydia on my first iOS device (my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS).
The clerk you are talking about, will still not know what NFC is for payments in a year from now. It doesn't change anything that Apple now joined the same game with Apple Pay... It's more infrastructure related and demand related.
Just like the Apple Watch, there is no actual demand for NFC Payments from regular users.
There was demand for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Also Maps applications are used a lot (Navigation).
We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash.
"We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash."
When I was living in the UK about 70% of my purchases were done with a chip and pin card, even a couple of beers at a pub.
This because in the end it was quicker and easier than using cash.
If NFC makes paying quicker and easier than using cash or cards, the demand will be there: by the end of the month there will be millions of iPhone6 customers waiting to test these new features.
If I were a shop/chain owner, I would be scrambling to try to please them, before the competition does.
Here in Canada, we have "contactless" payments on the major credit and debit cards. When it's time to pay, you just tap your card on the reader and it's done().
NFC payments using a phone would add a few more steps, so I think that the wallet and card is going to win out for me. It would be very hard to get it much simpler than it is right now.
() There are limits. My MasterCard, for example, will let me make contactless payments up to a total of $50. At that point it will require me to make a Chip&Pin transaction in order to reset the $50. When this happens the reader will just say "Insert Chip" or something.
Contactless is supported in the UK as well (usually up to a £20 minimum), but isn't nearly as widely supported as chip +pin, and I certainly don't know anyone who uses it regularly.
Once more supermarkets roll it out (I'm looking at you, Sainsburys), it'll start to get proper traction and kick on to being regular thing.
Also, it's often difficult to see whether a retailer has contactless even when you're standing Right There and then you do the normal chip+pin out of shame because you feel like a right fool with your card out.
I'm going out with some friends, everyone brings in 10 € into the shared "wallet".. (1 guy has an old Nokia, the rest is shared between Android, iPhone and Windows Phone). One guy has no wallet and only has Apple pay .
Next time he goes out with them, he will have his wallet. To give back the money he borrowed from his friends.
When the above situation can be handled.. There is an option for a walletless life. Where i live (Belgium), this won't happen within the next 2 years
The vast majority of men in the US will have their wallets with them regardless. The iPhone 6 will not, and is not designed to replace driver's license, etc.
For the ones that think a wallet isn't required anymore because of Apple Pay. How are you going to transfer money to your friend (with any other device or without a smartphone), with a transfer rate of 0% without cash?
If that problem is solved, there can be a future for a walletless life.
It costs you guys money to make bank transfers? Wow. For the record, I can send and receive money (for free) from my phone only needing the other person's phone number at this point. (Australian. Also, I've never used the pay-to-phone stuff because I just prefer to use their account number. I can do that for free from my phone too.)
It strikes me that our NFC infrastructure is way better than yours too. Somewhat a reverse of most patterns in tech-infrastructure. It's just a pity Google won't support the Nexus' NFC capabilities in Australia - I bet Apple will.
In fact, in young circles (in the US), this seems to have become the defacto way of transferring money socially between individuals. I don't think I have paid someone I know with physical cash in years.
Any number of services support ths - I believe Wallet, Venmo, Paypal and Square all offer some form of fee-less peer-to-peer transfer, because it has such a high value for organic growth as people send money to friends.
Supposedly the lack of updates for the Galaxy Nexus was down to the TI CPU they used. TI stopped working on mobile SoCs shortly after the Galaxy Nexus was released, so they no longer supported it and wouldn't provide any updated firmware needed for newer Android versions. The Verizon version was worse still for updates, but that's little surprise.
Either way, you're comparing 2 year old phones. I also got tired of fighting with Android and installing custom builds, but it's not really necessary these days. Stock builds are much more polished, and many of the more advanced features from OEM and custom builds have been integrated into stock Android. I recently got a HTC One and have found little need to root or install any custom ROMs on it - it does everything I need and doesn't seem worth the hassle any more.
I do agree with what you say about Google not "finishing the job". Many apps and services have been released with a lot of promise, but then been left relatively unchanged from early versions. If Apple Pay succeeds where Google Wallet has failed to gain traction, it will almost certainly be down to Apple making more of an effort to get merchants and services to support it. Perhaps they simly have more influence, but Google isn't exactly a small company, yet they often seem to fail in these areas. In particular, they make little effort to support things (Google Wallet NFC payments is one example) outside of the US. They're an international company, they have offices in many other countries, and yet many of their services remain US only, or take at least a year to be offered elsewhere.
It's relatively easy to update a gnex on your own, though[1]. I've spend maybe two hours keeping it up to date over the last ~3 years. Yeah, it would be awesome if that wasn't necessary, but in balance the benefits I get outweigh that inconvenience.
Having control over your own phone is a genuinely useful thing, not some abstract ideal. I've been using a wireless tether with a Verizon unlimited data plan for the last 5 years, something I simply couldn't have done with an iPhone. (And it's amazing how many hassles that removes -- I can get internet in the park, or in any shop no matter how shitty the wifi.)
1. I use this ROM: rootzwiki.com/topic/36706-romaosp62114-shiny-rom-ota-like-stock-android-444-ktu84p/#entry1031982
I was an Android early adopter T-Mobile G1/G2, then a Windows Phone, then iPhone. It's true though, it is easy to update your own ROM, I have an HP Touchpad I run android on.
I have all the control over my phone I desire to have, it does everything I could never need it to, I don't have to worry about my own ROM, or if updates to the system come, I press the update button when the phone tells me to do so, in short, I have the phone-appliance, a construct I am supremely happy with.
Apple products only have three errors (in order of likelihood):
1) You did it wrong.
2) It doesn't do that.
3) and rarely, It's an honest to god bug.
95% of the problems I've ever had with my phone are fixed by turning it off, and turning it on again - this ease of use led me to buy a Mac, another choice I'm quite happy with, it all more or less just works - and with the Mac I have enough freedom to replace the built in apps that don't work with ones that do - Chrome/Thunderbird/Adium instead of Safari, Mail.app and iMessage.
The Galaxy Nexus had a chipset that had been orphaned by TI (due to their total withdrawal from the industry), so Google kind of got the short end of the stick with that one.
That's an often bandied about excuse, but actually completely wrong - TI has continued to support existing customers and not only did Google go on to use an OMAP4 in Google Glass, but the Moto360 actually uses an OMAP3.
Google simply stopped supporting the Galaxy Nexus because they didn't feel like it.
That's short-term balance-sheet thinking. Which isn't a terrible way to make business decisions, but it definitely isn't the kind of thing that builds long-term consumer trust. There's a reason that Apple has tight supplier relationships and even makes a lot of their own chips: having committed to long-term value delivery, they work backward to make sure they can do that efficiently.
The new types of Linux desktops put me off (abandonment of typical desktop window management paradigms, removal of options), and I therefore stick with a Fedora 12 (!) VM running GNOME2 to write any Linux code on.
I too have the same problem with NFC, apart from here in the UK no Android payment systems are ready on the phone itself (you can only install it on some devices).
I also dislike the newer Linux desktop environments like Unity and Gnome 3, but XFCE, Cinnamon, and Mate are all an improvement over Gnome 2.
Agreed about NFC, it's frustrating that I've had NFC on my phone for 2 years now, but still not been able to use it for payments. EE does have an NFC payment service now, but for some reason they only let you use it on a few specific phones, not including my HTC. I'm not sure if this is down to differences in the hardware or just favouritism. I'm hoping that Apple Pay will at least push more places and services to support NFC payments in general.
Which message was that? I am still using GTalk on my phone (Android 4.1, no updates in site, such a relic of a phone to be two years old right? Xperia S - 32GB of storage and a decent camera, so why no updates? It's STUPID)
I notice that people attempting to communicate via Hangouts (on their phone?) doesn't notify me in Talk. If I attempt to call someone who has Talk on their phone from my web browser (therefore using Hangouts), they never get any notification. I can therefore never get in touch with my brother, unless I call him using Talk from my phone.
If someone attempts to talk to me via Hangouts, the message is shown in my inbox in the web interface, but NOT on my phone in GMail, nor in Talk on my phone. I therefore never find out about a message until I use the web interface, which I don't really do because I have GMail on my phone......
Just use Linux Mint w/Cinnamon. It feels like Windows 7 done right, and works almost great on Asus ultrabooks (they've broken something about battery life in Qiana).
Is F20 alright? Are things mostly working on it? I only ask because I have memories of my upgrades from FC1 to FC2 to FC4, to FC7 to FC10 to FC12 and things ALWAYS broke between them.
Here's an example: recently I wanted to get a route around a traffic jam. So, I tried to tell Google Now (on my Nexus 4) to "navigate to work". All of a sudden they took this feature away -- the only thing that comes up is a Google search trying to answer why this doesn't work. And nothing conclusive -- some people are having issues, others not. Android / Nexus was pretty good, but they keep on fixing it further till it's getting more and more broken.
Yes! They "fix" things that don't need fixing. Like their old Android Maps application - how does typing "OK Maps" logically mean you want to save offline maps? Why remove a menu item?
I keep the old one on my phone and resist installing the new one. Also, Google Local has gone?
That's the problem with cloud services I suppose, but at least if they had the decency to keep cloud services going whilst there were obvious users of them (without breaking things), that'd be appreciated. I mean, how long has MobileMe been going for OSX?
Really irritates me that I've put my home address (or an address very close to my home) in Google Maps, explicitly marked as home, but I can't type "home" as a destination. I have to start typing the address, then Google says "oh, you mean your home? Yeah I can do that".
My Nexus 5 is OK for $350, but after two years of trying the competition I'm going back to iOS next month. I like Apple's approach of getting the UX right and worrying about the other stuff (extensibility, standards compliance, filesystem, etc) after. Whatever incredibly nonstandard thing Safari does with text reflow is better than what Chrome (in 4.4) does, even if its more compliant. Having documents being able to open up in different apps is a huge pain in the ass. I download a PDF and for some reason it always asks whether I want to open it in Adobe or HP ePrint. But other times I'm stuck always opening documents in some app I don't want. Should I open this in YouTube or Chrome? Maps or Chrome? Just do the right thing and don't ask me! I still don't understand how the filesystem works. Older apps seem to have a different download folder or something than newer apps?
I'm not dumb. I used to write highly multithreaded network code for a living. I took Diff Eq in college! But Android makes me feel dumb, so I'm selling the N5.
I like being asked what to open it in. It means you can stop certain application pinching file associations, as typically happens in Windows (and iTunes is notorious for doing it on OSX).
When I used a Nexus 4 (stock), I could never figure out the opening in different apps. It would ask me if I wanted to open a reddit link in Chrome or Firefox or the reddit app. I would select Chrome and hit the "always do this" button, and the very next time it would ask again. The next time, it wouldn't ask. Then it would ask five times in a row.
It's almost as bad as "do you want to view this site in the tapatalk app?".
I think it's due to an app that can potentially use those links being installed and/or updated. It cancels the previous "always do this" otherwise you wouldn't be able to switch.
I think only the Nexus 5 started to catch up with the 4/5S in terms of speed and build quality. And it's only with CM11 on the N5 that it begins to reach the "smoothness" of Apple's UI (and yes, I know there are some tricks used).
I love the way my Nexus 5 runs. I use it just as much as my iPhone 5 and although it doesn't have the same UX niceties, it's still plenty smooth and fast.
What really frustrates me is the camera. Some photos are great, others look like the image has been made deliberately bad. I don't think the Nexus phones will deliver a great camera experience any time soon, and there's only so much compensation that G+ can make to a dull, blurry photo.
Who gives a shit. They're both converging on the same form-factors and features. It's good we have at least two successful smartphone platforms. If there were only one there would be less innovation and more price gouging.
Competition spurs innovation. Samsung copies from Apple whatever is successful there, Apple copies from Samsung/Google whatever is successful there. Would Apple have created a phablet if Samsung hadn't innovated and proved the market? Probably not. Samsung doesn't have the fingerprint reader, but it's probably coming. And then they'll have to think of something new to differentiate themselves.
“Samsung copies from Apple whatever is successful there, Apple copies from Samsung/Google whatever is successful there.”
That doesn’t really sound like innovation.
EDIT: Never mind, I didn’t pick up on the actual gist of your comment, that being the copying done by each company forces the other to come up with new, possibly innovative ideas to one up the competition.
Samsung didn't innovate the phablet, many people had released 5" devices before them. They have, however, sold many more than anyone previously ("proved the market").
