Negotiations with the carrier turns out differently for different companies with different carriers. Wow, who’da thunk. The integration of Apple on the one hand via WiFi, versus downloading a third party app and clicking it for 3G ... well, whatever floats your boat. I’ll go with Apple.
One thing is pretty evident regardless, and that is that carriers do not want devices with certain native capabilities on their 4G networks at present. That will no doubt change in the future, but that future is not yet here.
Great, so you’d rather not have the feature available most of the time. I guess that is progress, but for most people I don’t think it is.
How hard is it to set up an app? Most people have done it at least once, and pretty much every one can sign up (you do it if you want an MSN, Yahoo, GMail, ICQ or other account).
Yes, Apple integrates a lot of stuff; at the same time, you are limited in what you can do with your phone, and what apps you can use. So if it works exactly as-is for you, great. But if you ever want anything slightly outside the walled garden Apple has given you, well, you’re stuck.
Yes, I think I will go with Apple too. I saw a video on the Internet yesterday. A software developer said that Apple's iPhone was the easiest mobile to develop applications for because there was one hardware platform and one operating system. The Android market was more difficult because each vender has multiple types of hardware with different versions of the operating system. And then when they do update the OS, the apps may fail.
I think Apple really has the right strategy here--vertical integration of hardware, operating system and applications.
“One thing is pretty evident regardless, and that is that carriers do not want devices with certain native capabilities on their 4G networks at present. That will no doubt change in the future, but that future is not yet here.”
Wireless companies do not want more bandwidth hogging devices on their network. Until they can run fiber to cell phones I don’t see that changing. The more bandwidth the higher cost to provide the service.