It’s inevitable. Whenever Apple updates its products, especially its phones like the new iPhone 6, fans of other kinds of phones come out of the woodwork to proclaim them lame and to tout that their preferred phone had those new features first, like this one: “6 iPhone features that my Android had in 2010”. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to prove. Is it supposed to be that Apple and its fans are lame and only us super-cool Android/Windows/Blackberry owners aren’t? Look, just because your phone had a feature list that included a particular function that iPhones now have doesn’t mean your old phone necessarily did it better. In fact, even if it’s the exact same feature, it could be that within the context of the whole Apple package, the whole Apple ecosystem, those features work better overall for the majority of Apple users.
To illustrate the absurdity of this game, let me give my own list of 6 Samsung Galaxy S4 (or iPhone 6) features that my Blackberry Pearl had in 2008.
- Telephone calls. That’s right. I could type right any phone on the keypad and make an actual phone call to an actual person. I didn’t need some super-cool smartphone to do it.
- Voicemail. And if the person I was calling wasn’t answering their phone, I could leave a message. Not just any message, but a recording of my actual voice.
- Texting. If I didn’t or couldn’t talk to my friend, I could type out a little message to them on my phone and send it to them. And they’d get a little message to pop up on their phone. I could even send photos.
- Email. That’s right, I could get and send email from my own email account to any email account on the Internet. not just to other phones.
- Web. My little Pearl even had a web browser on it. I could tap in the web address and see a version of almost any web site.
- Photos. I didn’t have to carry a separate camera anymore because my Pearl could photos, store them, and download them later to my computer.
Yep, 6 features my Blackberry did that your Android does too. Of course, your Android (and my iPhone) does them infinitely better plus so much more and that’s the point. Comparisons of feature lists are pointless because people don’t use feature lists. They use phones which are the cohesive amalgamation of all those features so that the sum is more or less than it parts. How well do those individual features work? How well do they work together? What is unique about the implementation of those features on one phone versus another?
But fanboy wars that rage on because somehow your choice of one brand somehow offends me because I choose another brand is stupid and it does a disservice to the vast majority of people out there who don’t care about brands and are just depending on us to help them figure which damn phone is best for them.
Hahaha – this is great! I recently saw a comedian – can’t remember who it was now – talking about how insanely angry he gets with people who dare to actually CALL him on his cellular phone instead of texting. I must admit I have felt this way before, as well.