Comment Re:hmmm (Score 1) 272
I don't find it surprising that slashdot users favor android. I also don't find it surprising that they are a bit antagonistic about iOS. Your study here is akin to going to a secular humanism newsgroup and then concluding based on the posts there that atheists are numerous and more antagonistic than theists.
I don't have any data to back this up, so I'll understand if you decide to disregard my opinion, but my experience is that android users are far better informed about iOS and its advantages and disadvantages, and tend to prefer android on its merits more than out of fanboyism (though surely it is a factor, I suspect it is less of a factor than with apple). As for why they might be antagonistic? I don't know, but it might be at least partly a reaction to apple fans being obnoxious about their products. I'm reminded of Maddox's bit on apple. I've met quite a few apple loyalists who seem unwilling to consider alternatives, and when you consider that the alternatives usually provide more value for your money in all of the quantifiable ways (except number of apps with iOS devices), it comes off as a reaction to cognitive dissonance. You see them rationalizing about how you can't get viruses with apple computers (you can) or how things just work (in my experience, they often don't) or how apple's support might be better (they might be right).
And I know what you're probably thinking. I'm just a fanboy and I don't see it. But it's not quite as simple as that. My first smartphone *was* an iPhone. My initial assumptions about Android were generally negative. Seemed like a copycat and I was skeptical that it could perform as well. I used to come up with any rationalization I could, even when presented with conflicting evidence. "Well surely the iPhone easier to use" or "It's probably more reliable" or "I don't need to run multiple processes" (yes, I know, they fixed that) or "Voice dialing? eh, it's a luxury I don't have any use for". Reading reviews and talking to people, I learned that actually android had a lot to offer that iOS did not, and I got increasingly fed up with the lack of features. What finally did it in for me was when the iOS4 update turned my iPhone 3G into an unreliable useless piece of slag. Apps would autoclose themselves, take forever to load, etc. (some apps, like the dictionary one, would autoclose every time before fully loading). Some of my games became useless. All of my data was deleted by the sync operation. Sure, some of it I synced and got back, like contacts, apps, and music, but most of my app data was gone (including videos I had taken with a 3rd party app since the iPhone 3G didn't have integrated video capture). It was as if I suddenly noticed my apple koolaid was spiked with piss. Yes, I could have gotten an iPhone 4 and most of those issues would have been answered, but by then I no longer thought of apple as any better than anyone else if I could experience all of those issues... so I opened my mind and looked into alternatives, and based on every quantifiable feature, android phones just looked better.