Originally Posted By: robricc
Verizon LTE is nothing to sneeze at. I'm envious of it and I'm slightly concerned with breaking my AT&T contract now that LTE is rolling out,

Agreed, LTE is quite nice, and one reason I'll be slightly envious of the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon. Though for now, I'm fine with waiting a little bit for battery life concerns of LTE chipsets to be addressed. AT&T 3G speeds are usually pretty good in areas where their network isn't swamped. If I were a Verizon or Sprint 3G customer, I'd be eagerly looking to get to a proper 4G device.

Originally Posted By: robricc
The T-Mobile $30 "Walmart" plan is tailor-made for me

This is the one plan I had really wanted to jump to with the unlocked 4S, but with no pentaband radio, I'd be stuck on edge. For now, I am sticking with my base AT&T plan, which works out to $50ish a month between my family plan and discount. If the next iPhone goes LTE, I'll reevaluate then.

Originally Posted By: robricc
Apple's first mistake was their policy of not unlocking US phones

I do like how AT&T likes to point the finger at Apple, and Apple points the finger back to AT&T regarding unlocking. I have to wonder if this was some weird concession during the exclusivity period. Really stupid policy in any case, whoever is ultimately behind it.

Originally Posted By: robricc
Apple's second mistake was not releasing an iPhone 5, which was what I was anticipating coming back to.

Not to derail the thread too much, but what about a so called iPhone 5 had you interested above the 4S? As far as I can tell, the iPhone 5 rumors started with a baseless "I heard from a friend" and were amplified into near "fact" by the internet echo chamber, with no real basis in reality. I pay very little attention to Apple rumors these days, since most seem to be link bait to ensure ad views on an otherwise slow news day.

Originally Posted By: robricc
Saying ICS is an iOS killer is pointless since some people think the earliest versions of Android already accomplished that. But, it's clear that Google is paying attention to what makes iOS so appealing. ICS is fantastic. Any die-hard iOS fan would have to admit it. It's too bad Sense and TouchWiz will probably ruin it for the majority of devices.

I am glad to see the improvements, as Android really didn't interest me much when I tried it out with the Captivate. ICS does interest me more, but I don't see myself switching over it. The Google ecosystem simply doesn't interest me, especially after my Google account pretty much imploded earlier this year with the release of Google Plus. With no one to contact for assistance, and no way to easily fix the issue, I nuked it and moved on. I've had MobileMe quirks, but I've also had support to contact, and never faced a situation (yet) that required a restart from scratch.

Hopefully with Google's more focused approach in general, they will continue to improve across the board. Their products up till now outside the core search have all very much felt like engineers gone wild, with no design sense to them. I do find it interesting that ICS is basically 3.0 for the phone side. Makes me wonder if Google is going to turn out similar to Microsoft, where it took until the 3rd major revision of a product for it to start turning into something really interesting.