>>For several years I praised Android - and I generally agreed, MS has had a big mountain to climb. My two cents....

Who are you and what have you done with KG? The old KG taunted and denied that Android was dominating smartphone sales when I tried to report sales figures. But whatever.

>>I'm increasingly disappointed and frustrated with Android. Much of the MS criticisms about Android have truth to them - O.S. versions and apps have (IMO become increasingly buggy)

Fair enough. Google is onto it- they're selling the Galaxy 4 cheap via their app store with latest vanilla Android rather than a vendor concoction. IMHO they'll start pushing vendor variations as low quality rather than a point of differentiation as the manufacturers hope.

>>I'm upgrading soon and am switching (after nearly 4 years) from Android to iOS. Bottom line, you cannot beat iOS for usability and their ecosystem. Say what you will about Apple's tactics...and I can't believe I'm about to talk like a user and not like a developer....often I just want something where I can navigate quickly. iPad apps just plain work. Android apps don't always follow the rule about the shortest distance between two points.

Fair enough. Everybody else in my household is an iO fiend. Kids have multiple iOS devices with cool Android phones bounced back to Dad. Apple has done an incredible job of making its devices cool to young dudettes- so much so that I have one of those aluminium Envy 17 3D "wannabe Mac" notebooks so the kids don't say "ugh, grandpa box." I kid you not. Meanwhile I stick with Android portable devices so I can add memory and mess with the OS and install my own apps without jail-breaking and have 2 mouse buttons and easy right-click... and so I can buy dual sim devices out of China. FWIW, a lot of these Chinese devices don't appear in the stats and there are a fair few people in China, so Android is even bigger than quoted.

>>I've seen and have played around with the newest windows mobile phones. Great camera, great O.S., nice features.... but still has far to go to hit the mass market. Sadly, (to use a bookstore analogy), it's still viewed by many as a specialty trade paperback. It's too bad because they ARE cool.

Yep, but Betamax was far cooler than VHS as well. I agree it no longer matters once the tipping point is reached. MS once benefited from this, now they're on the receiving end and aren't coping very well. Shame- I've always expressed concern about a cozy duopoly but it's worse than that. Apple has established its own wealthy ecosystem and the rest that matters is Android. They aren't really competing. Google is the new MS, currently at a stage when I still was enamored with MS, so maybe we can expect the same sort of trends long term.