Smartphone?

I bought my first iPhone in 2008. I was late to the party with an iPhone 3G, not enough of an apple fanboy to want to snap up the version 1. The first application I obtained for the phone was Stitcher. This because I wanted to be able to listen to the select few scientific and tech podcasts that I enjoyed plus of course, Car Talk and the Friday Night Comedy show from Aunty Beeb. I have listened to literally thousands of hours of podcasts using Stitcher and the application has mostly been the primary use of my iPhone. In the four years that I've owned an Apple phone, I have never been inspired to throw it against a wall and smash it into a million bits.

Recently I bought an Alcatel 991Android phone. Ok, I'm a cheapskate but the idea was to use it for my few small personal projects and app ideas so I couldn't justify forking over a fortune for what I admit is definitely a secondary bit of kit. I've used it with success to test my own app and I am now writing a game. Simply because I had stuffed the sim-card from my iPhone 4S into the Alcatel so I could use Google Maps outside, I decided to put Stitcher on the phone too, just so I could grab whichever phone had the network connection at the time and scoot out to town or to see the kids.

The Android phone suffers from menus even more deeply nested and annoying than the iPhone. I have been using it as a tether on and off too. These have been minor annoyances and forgivable as different rather than plain egregious. The clincher for me came about fifteen minutes into a recent car journey with my son. There is a signal black-spot on the lee of a hill not far from my house. The iPhone will always have downloaded enough of the podcast to continue playing audio while we go through that bit. The Android didn't. Not only that, the app skipped and jumped, rewound and played in an endless loop of waa waa waa waa waa waa for about five minutes such that I almost stopped the car in order to throw the Alcatel on the floor and jump all over it smashing it into a million bits. Later, my best and most loved app decided to rewind to the beginning of Science Friday over and over so that I eventually pulled the battery out of the phone and drove in silence.

I LOVE my Apple phone. I LOVE my Macbook Air. I LOVE my iPad. I LOVE my little Mac Mini. Everything works smoothly apart from the very occasional crash. It all "gells".

I really like my Windows phone. I feel comfortable working with Microsoft's Visual Studio and frameworks. I don't _love_ it but its work, it gets the job done, I'm happy. I don't _love_ my Kobalt socket set but they undo nuts when I need them to.

I almost, almost smashed my Android phone to smithereens within fifteen minutes of using it seriously for the first time. I had to send back two crap Android tablets before I got a good one. I wonder how that experience would have affected me if I had suffered it when I was adopting the technology?