In October 2011, I bought an iPhone 4S and left the Android camp (for the moment, anyway). The first thing one would think about is — why?
The iPad
To understand why, one needs to know the chronology of events. I hadn’t lived with either an Android device or an iOS device at the time. In July 2010, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S, easily the best Android device at the time. In October 2010, I made a far more important acquisition. I bought an iPad.
Somewhere in the second half of 2010, I was offered a job on the Gold Coast. I decided to take it. Needless to say, there was a lot of packing involved — and I needed a very important device. I needed something for small amounts of personal computing, be it surfing the web or simply playing a few games. Now that the iPad was out, it was a no brainer. Netbooks were simply inferior to the convenience that was the iPad.
I bought an iPad and never looked back.
Using an iOS Device
I was no stranger to the wonderful way Apple devices just worked. You rarely needed to know all the quirks and steps usually needed to get things running. All you needed was to follow your instincts and the device would get you up and running within moments. Back when people were busy trying to get projectors to work correctly with their laptops, Apple had long gotten it right. Plug in the cable and all would be well (for 95% of people anyway).
The iPad setup process, however, was less than straightforward. You needed to connect it to a computer for set up and other things. Fortunately, I could activate it at home. Unfortunately, I would be without a computer to sync it to until much later.
Compared to my Galaxy S, getting it to work was painless. (This was however, more Samsung’s fault than Google’s.) The GPS locked within seconds. The iPad, running with less RAM and graphics power than my Galaxy S, made my Galaxy S look and feel positively sluggish. The prevalent ‘Android lag’ I had been reading about suddenly made sense.
Regret
At that point, I had realized why people were in the Apple camp. It wasn’t just an OS thing. It was that Apple were indeed making the better smartphones. I was now in that camp as well.
As time passed, the gap between Android and iOS closed. FroYo and Gingerbread Android updates made my Galaxy S better, while iOS 4 fell further and further behind. It didn’t have notifications and still didn’t have the calendar features I wanted. At this point (somewhere in early 2011), I was still saying I would probably buy the next iPhone. I had someone who would be willing to inherit my current phone, so switching would have been beneficial to both of us.
iOS 5
Eventually, Apple announced iOS 5. This version of iOS finally came with notifications and with those notifications, quick access to my calendar items. I was sold. At that point, we were still waiting on Apple’s new iPhone announcement. (This was somewhere in June by the way.)
In October, Apple finally announced the next generation iPhone: the iPhone 4S — and so I switched to an iPhone.
(Of course, now that this is many months ago, the Galaxy Nexus has been announced. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t hear about any other new Ice Cream Sandwich running Androids until recently. Or maybe I'm just rambling and trying to JUSTIFY ALL THE THINGS!)