[300bps]

IPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, Lumia 928. Those are my last four smart phones.

I didn't feel locked in at all to the "app ecosystem". Honestly web and email were paramount and everything else is secondary. At some point in the future I believe native apps will be passe in favor of a complete move to web applications making the underlying platform completely personal preference.

...oh.and at one time I was locked into my Palm Pilot. After that my Blackberry. Tell Apple to look at Palm or RIM if they want to know how long being the popular phone on the market lasts.

[matwood]

Not just the phone market, but any consumer market. Consumers are fickle and can love something one day and hate it the next.

[lttlrck]

Why did you switch if web and email are paramount? I am genuinely interested.

[300bps]

Because Windows Phone does web and email better than iPhone.

The primary way it is better is that the screen is so much bigger. This is easy to dismiss, but it makes a ton of UI hacks done for the iPhone needless. For example, the fact that the address bar isn't on the screen all the time is a hack to compensate for the small screen. Then that leads to a need for the hack where you click the top of the screen in the browser to rapidly scroll to the top. Sometimes that's a nice feature, but only if your screen is so small that they can't always display the address bar unless you've scrolled all the way to the top. Sometimes it's the most annoying thing in the world - like when you've scrolled past 7 pages of information reading in the browser and then accidentally click the rapid scroll-up button. There is no rapid scroll-down button to undo that.

My wife has an iPhone 5 and honestly it feels like a tiny little toy when I use it. The screen is ridiculously small.

Now for the other nice things... I can copy music to it without the iTunes bloatware. I plug my phone in, something pops up and then I just copy music to it. With Windows Phone, I have two copies of my music - my computer and my phone. With iPhone I had three copies - what was on my computer, what was on my phone and what the iTunes library. Keeping three things in sync was a massive pain.

The integration to Skydrive is much better than iCloud as well. My Lumia 928 has 32 GB of storage but with SkyDrive I get an additional 125 GB (of which 25 GB was free). I can seamlessly access pictures, video and music right from it as long as I have a signal.

The Nokia maps are the best maps application I ever used. Much better than either Google Maps or Apple Maps. Speaking of signal - the maps application have online and offline capabilities. So if I have no signal whatsoever there is a local copy of map data on my phone so I can still get directions.

I have three young kids and my Windows Phone has a KidZone. I put certain apps in there and then put it into the KidZone mode and my kids are locked into those apps unless they type my password. No more deleting icons accidentally, no more sending emails on my behalf accidentally, no more doing anything I don't want them to do like they did constantly with my iPhone.

This is long enough - the bottom line is that Windows Phone is superior in every way that matters to me to any iPhone I ever owned.

[loxs]

Well, Android has all of this, and then some more. Except maybe for the Nokia Maps. Haven't used it and can't say, but Google Maps on Android is FAR better than the iOS counterpart. So why Windows Phone and not Android?

[300bps]

Android and Windows Phone are both far superior to iPhone at this point. Between those two it comes down to personal preference. Windows Phone seems much more polished to me than Android. But I would be happy with a Galaxy S4. The only non-contender in my mind at this point is the iPhone. It has nothing going for it in comparison to the competition.

I have a Jelly Bean tablet with a 10.1" screen that I use every day and am happy with it.

[drbawb]

> The screen is ridiculously small.

To which I'd say the screens on WP8 and Android flagships are ridiculously large and poorly calibrated.

I feel as though I'm in the minority: but it pains me to use anything larger than an iPhone 4S. (The iPhone 5 included, sadly.)

I'd love to leave the iOS ecosystem, as I agree with your other criticisms. I long for the days where I can use foobar2k to manage my portable media player again -- but there's _no where for me to go._

The iPhone isn't a "little toy" to me, it's the only flagship phone I can use comfortably.

I feel left behind, as if I'm some sort of refugee from the display wars. -- Who will cater to me? Sony seems to be on the right track. At least their giant-Xperia has finally relocated the controls to be a bit more ergonomic.