Almost Time to Pick the Next Phone

My 2-yr contract will end by this Nov. So in 2 months I’ll have the chance to pick a new phone! It’s hard to understand how much this “commitment” is until I experienced this 2-year contract. Basically you’re locked to this carrier and this phone for 2 whole years! That’s a big deal, considering Chinese users change phones every 6 months in average. I’ve been very satisfied with my iPhone 4S , however I do feel a little tired of it after 20 months.

So I seriously started to consider the next option after the Apple iPhone 5c/5s event last week. That event was quite disappointing because almost all tapping points were leaked upfront. 5c is just a gay-colored 5, and 5s doesn’t have many revolutionary or exciting features. Fingerprint is useful but already everywhere (even on office doors); and M7 chip seems having some great potential but no one really knows it yet.

Despite my several unpleasant experiences with Android, mainly with company test devices, I started to look into current leading Android phones. Frankly Moto X is the one catching most of my attention. I don’t really care screen size as I think it only matters if you need to use lots of badly designed web pages or apps. And the features Moto X promotes are pretty cool in my eyes: always-on voice command, active notification and write-flip activated camera. However after checking several detail reviews, I noticed Moto X had an obvious weakness: camera… I consider myself a frequent Instagram user, so a bad camera is a big turn-off to me.

Then I looked back at iPhone 5s, and realized it’s the SAME price as Moto X or any other Android “flagship” phones. Although 5s’ “progress” is not that impressive compared to previous iPhones, iPhone 5s is not bad at all compared to any other Android phones. With the best camera, software collection, 1st-class display and hardware spec, I don’t see much reason to choose an Android over iPhone 5s…

Sprint is running a new user promotion of 100$ discount for iPhone 5c/5s, but current users who want to upgrade their phones (like me) aren’t included. I don’t understand how their business plan is… Maybe US users hop across carriers after 2 years anyway, so Sprint decided to only care about attracting hoppers from other carriers and not to care how many users hop from them? Fine. I’ll hop.