Hey! I can do all that on my Android, and for less than the iPhone.
Really, the only difference between the two is price. Well, that and image, I suppose. Apparently if you don't use an iPhone then you are a planet-hating heathen that's totally uncool and kinda dorky.
Well, and the fact that way too many actions on the iPhone require you to synch it to your computer.
iTunes is the world's worst excuse for a media player/store/sync manager, I still don't know how the guy in charge of its design isn't fired. But the fact that it keeps everything in one place makes it just work for some people. Myself included. As long as I don't try to do anything the music industry wouldn't like, everything's fine and dandy.
It hasn't required syncing to a computer since the last major iOS update came out in 2011. You can own one without even owning a computer.
iOS updates happen to still be going on for 3 year old phones, btw, which is something that can't be said about Android. This Atrix I got last year is still stuck on 2.3 and they say I might get 4.0 by the end of the 3rd quarter (I'm not holding my breath, only a couple weeks to go). 4.0 of course already being out of date.
Also, price of the phone is moot, it's cell phone carriers that charge you for service you don't need that makes the biggest dent in your wallet, not the price of the phone. If you take the carrier subsidy out of the picture, competing Android phones are the same price or higher - $600 for a Galaxy S3, $650 for an iPhone 5, $750 for a Galaxy Note, etc. Google is selling their Nexus stuff at a razor thin profit margin to get it out there in people's hands. Aside from that, high end phones have always been this expensive. Remember the original Motorola Razr? $500 when it came out, after the $100 rebate from Cingular.
Apple has made a phone that works the way I think a phone should, so I use it. And I get a lot of heat from it, but I've taken bigger insults than "haw haw, you are an iSheep" so it doesn't bother me none. I have plenty of reasons. What I like most about iOS is that it's smooth, stable, and intuitive. It's easily the best OS I've used yet, and I've used a lot of them.
Android fans often like to thump the spec sheet and brag about how many more checkboxes they've got on the comparison tables. Specs are all well and good, whatever floats your boat, but when everybody from toddlers to grandpas can pick up an iPhone or an iPad and figure it out and not have to Ctrl-Alt-Delete, you know the user interface designers got something right.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of your specs. I grew up a specs geek. Overclocked my PC for the fun of it. Rebuilt it every 6 months cause Windows stopped working. Tweaked for hours to get 3 more frames a second in Quake 3. But I'm a little wiser (as in wiseass), sometimes I just want my crap to work. I don't always have time to play Tetris with my PC components or my Android widgets or my task manager.
User interface is part of my job, and I'm constantly amazed at how well Apple did theirs. I compare it to Android in the same way that I compare Mac OS X to Windows: they have their priorities right. Both figuratively and technically.
Android's UI is not run at a high priority, they allow it to lock up and slow down during periods of processor activity. And the system design itself seems like a series of afterthoughts. That they just keep throwing more cores at the problem tells you something about their engineering philosophy.
Apple puts the UI at the forefront of processing priority, and puts the most thought into it. Every decision they make, every UI feature that is implemented, is followed by a "this works, but is there an even better way to do it?" The end result is ultimately a better experience.
Until I saw Windows Phone 7, I thought no other company would pick up on that idea that a super easy, smooth UI can do wonders.
Android 4.1 seems to have figured some of it out finally, so maybe there will be some real competition in UI. I feel more confident in that future with Matias Duarte at the helm, he's the guy responsible for webOS, which was the most promising UI I'd seen at the time. Many aspects of it still haven't been equaled by any OS.
I really wish Android would fix the Bluetooth stack. I have to deal with it every week. I pull a hair out every time I get a report from someone thinking there's a problem with my software. "my Android phone is asking for a pin to connect and even when I enter it, it's not allowing me to connect to media" - have you tried rebooting it? "Oh that worked, thanks"
I do like how the iPhone 5 benchmarks showed up on Geekbench whopping the latest Exynos based Galaxy S3 and Tegra 3 based Nexus 7. Everybody sure was quick to cradle their quad core phones and tablets and said "specs don't matter, Android is god!"
It's all as polarizing and divisive as sports teams, racing, religion and politics. There will never be the one phone to rule them all, there are just phones that work better and then there are phones that are made for geeks who don't mind rebooting every day because their OS has up and lost its mind again.
Don't get me started on having to deal with Apple as a manufacturer/developer though. The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comes to mind.
