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Gentlemen Prefer Androids, Ladies iOS
Ponca City writes "PC World reports that women are more likely to buy an iPhone for their next smartphone purchase, while men prefer Android devices. According to data collected in October 2010, 31 percent of women wanted to buy an Apple iOS device next, followed by 22.8 percent interested in a Google Android device while among men preferences were reversed with 32.6 percent of men interested in an Android purchase and 28.6 desired an iOS phone. 'So where is the extra appeal of Android to men coming from?' asks Tracey E. Schelmetic. 'More male-targeted commercials that emphasize cool gadgetry versus usability? More techno-macho phone brand names like "Droid"? Extra advertising on the Spike channel by phone makers using the Android platform?'"
That Verizon's splashy "Android devices are death-robots from the future who can tear you to shreds with a single shot from their massive feature lists" campaign might have had something to do with that. And then you get into the fact that Apple has been producing devices with off-the-charts WAF for ages now...
So where is the extra appeal of Android to men coming from?
Uh, its right there in the name - android as in greek for man.
If they wanted chicks to buy them they should have called then gynoids.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
android is for porn remember????
Because the Android isn't about ME.
Think of the naming conventions used
"i"Phone, about the individual (although one could easily argue it is a controlled environment brought on by monopolistic practices)
Droid, autonomous device that empowers the user through its open architecture.
Of course I could be one sided, as (DISCLAIMER) I have a Droid.
31 vs 32.6 falls within the unspecified margin of error for that "survey".
Q: What's the hardest part about using an iPhone?
A: Coming out to your parents
I don't see how you need much more common sense to be able to operate a Droid in comparison to an iPhone. They're nearly identical.
I think part of the draw for Android is that you can tweak and customize it more. And I don't just mean installing a custom OS. Also just customizing it with widgets and other stuff. Even just the stock "customizations" of manufacturers, like SenseUI and all those others. Android is pretty powerful and flexible there. And I suspect men are on average slightly more likely to tinker with their phones than women.
Real men just shout loud enough that whoever they want to reach, can hear them.
And they don't get lost, so they don't need no stinking GPS either.
Years ago cigarette companies conducted a survey of doctors and brands they preferred. They advertised the brand they preferred as doctor recommended. I was not so much that doctors necessarily preferred any of the brands, but if one does a survey and sorts the results, one will have top and a bottom, though it may have no statistical or physical meaning.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And exactly what type of "configuration settings, tweaking this, adjusting that and so on" would have to be done to get an Android or WP7 or a Palm Pre working?
My wife uses the Epic 4g and she bought it on her own, only once entered her Gmail account details and from there on she hasn't needed to do any tweaking at all apart from arranging the App shortcuts the way she likes and that was as easy as it can get. When it gets the 2.2.1 update - it will be a single click for her. If the phone needs replacement - all she needs to do is again reenter her GMail password and all apps, contacts etc. will be right there automagically. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Heck I have seen so many iPhone users - male and females - that did not know that iPhone OS software needs updated because they don't deal with iTunes. The Android ones on the other hand tend to be up2date as the update process is one click on the notification followed by hitting OK.
If you actually pivot the data, though, you see that while Android preferers are vastly on the male side, iOS preferers are split pretty much 50/50. In other words, it's not that "women prefer iOS" so much as it's that Android only seems to appeal to males while iOS is balanced closer to what would be expected from a random sample.
E pluribus unum
In the "settings" of android, there's an entire section where you can get the privacy information from Google et al. It tells you exactly what it's recording. Maybe you think they're violating that? I find that unlikely, as they would be breaking the law pretty blatantly.
Not exactly directly related but.. People seem to forget that android isn't "just google's", it's the OHA. So you should, if you're going to worry about them stealing your privacy, worry about more than just google.
Maybe naming it the "iPad" wasn't so dumb after all....
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I loved Symbian on my N95, I hated it on the N97, I am now back in love with Symbian^3 on the N8. I am willing to say this is the best cell phone I have ever had bar none. I have an N900, but don't consider it a cell phone. The N900 is a linux tablet with a phone app.
Back to cell phones. The US press seems to forget Symbian exists, is rock solid stable, ans is very clean and fast. Symbian was fast on a 60 mhz processor, and literally screams on the N8. For once I would like to see a review written by some one that is used to Symbian instead of an iPhone user complaining how it is different than his beloved Apple product, or some such similar from and Android Fanboi.
Nokia has made some very bad management decisions in the last few years, but their engineer elves have been busy. The N8 really is the best cell phone, both hardware and software that Nokia has ever produced and deserves a close look.
I am glad I didn't listen to "Symbian is dead" and bought an N8.
I love it.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I'm a software engineer, and even I'm not interested in any of that crap. I have a life outside of tweaking shit on my phone.
Exactly.
To repeat what TFA said, 31% of women want an iPhone and 22.8% want an Android. In order to determine if this difference is statistically significant (alpha = 0.05, beta = 0.2) they'd have needed to ask 508 women.
Did they really? Who knows. There's no confidence interval. Maybe they asked everybody.
Masturbating to a video of Steve Jobs on your iPhone doesn't count.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Males tend to be more tech-savvy.
I'll agree with your generalization and offer you another. Women tend to be marketed to for purposes of fashion more than men. iPhones are "cool", "hip", and "trendy". Android phones have a larger feature list which is inherently none of those three things.
"Oh no... he found the
Ah, sexism and fanboyism all in one. Nice.
What is ironic is that Android is more standalone and can fend for itself. The only times I need to connect an Android device to a PC for stuff other than charging is when I am copying nandroid and Titanium Backup backup files from the SD card to the PC for safekeeping, or loading MP3/AAC files onto the device for music. Android phones take care of app updates, OS updates, essentially everything by themselves. To boot, the PC the Android device connects to can be *any* OS that can handle USB drives. I can hook the phone to a USB port on an IBM Power Systems 795, then use AIX to mount and copy the files from it.
iOS devices not just have to have a desktop box to sync to, it has to be either OS X or Windows, and an OS that is in constant connection to the Internet, especially come OS updates for SHSH validation. iOS devices are also designed to be attached and synced often to iTunes.
So, in this respect, Android is a lot better.
Oh really? Why can I name at least two friends who's iPhone's stopped working until they had a clean OS restored? On one of the phones the WI-FI broke, and the other the voice calls entirely stopped working.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
If she get's an iPhone she knows she can be on her own. It's not a fucking PC, it doesn't need a fucking support department. Android might need a factory reset and restore every once in a while. iPhone doesn't.
If you like iPhones that's your perorgative, but if you honestly believe the marketing slogan "it just works", you're brain dead.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer