setspeed

But that would be a fair fight, and of course no-one is allowed to put the iPhone in a fair fight because it might lose. /s

I’m pretty sure you could do those things even quicker with the SGS3, since you don’t need to touch the phone to wake it. Also even touching your phone whilst driving is illegal in some places, so another win for Samsung, given your usage cases.

The ICS implementation of multitasking is a bag of shit. Sure, it looks pretty, and having a dedicated key rather than long-pressing Home is quicker to access. But having a long scrolling list of open apps is an utter usability fail compared to a group of icons immediately brought up on the one screen which you can quickly choose from.

Exactly. The OEMs have a choice not to use Android if they wish. Let’s look at the options:
1. Use WP. Look how that’s working out. No-one buys WP.
2. Build their own OS, and have to try and build an ecosystem around worth a damn, so that customers will flock. Very difficult and expensive to do, and probably a guaranteed failure (see 1.)
3. Use Android as they have done for the last few year, but now have an additional pressure of keeping their software updated in a reasonable time IF they wish to compete with Nexus phones. Or not. People will still buy Android even with an older version of the OS.

It’s all well and good saying “try using it’s features”, let’s take a look at the ones you mentioned:

1. “Connecting to the largest music store in the world”:
Personally the vast majority of my music comes from browsing music blogs and sites like soundcloud, followed by a purchase from the artist themselves via any number of independent labels and sites like bandcamp. I am a music lover, I enjoy searching for great music and the vast majority of the music I like is not on iTunes. Sorry but that’s a fact. The OP may be the same. Or he may prefer to torrent all his music. Or he may not listen to much music at all. The point being that being connected to iTunes is NOT a great feature for some people. It is however a great way to give more money to Apple.

2. “Voice control over most features”.
Siri hardly controls “most” features. It can’t even launch 3rd party apps, and a lot of it’s real-world uses such as searching for local stuff flat out doesn’t work unless you’re in N. America. It’s an incremental step, and it doesn’t always work properly anyway. The actual amount of benefit MOST people would get out of Siri (in it’s current state) is minimal. Exceptions may be made for the disabled. Sure it’s a feature, but something to crow about? I think not.

3. “Having the highest pixel density on the market (though the competition is catching up)”:
I think you’ll find that the iPhone no longer has the highest pixel density on the market.
iPhone 4/S: 326 ppi, Sony Xperia S: 342 ppi, HTC Rezound 342ppi, Nokia E6 328 ppi.
Also there are other phones which aren’t far off the iPhone’s ppi, such as HTC One X 312 ppi – ie. the difference is negligable, especially when taking into account that most of these phones have much bigger screens than the iPhone and therefore you would not need to hold it so close to your face. So the iPhone doesn’t stand out from the crowd in this respect I’m afraid.

The point I’m making is that not all the features are actually worth anything to a lot of people, and hence they don’t understand what the fuss is about when they are presented with a pretty glass brick with an operating system that has a tendency to get in your way when you want to do a lot of things. The OP is entitled to his opinion on how the phone doesn’t suit him, and he gave you his opinion to discuss, which you did.
And to be clear, I’m not an iOS hater – I think it has some great qualities. But the ones you mentioned aren’t them.
See, all personal choice. And if we all kept our opinions to ourselves for fear of upsetting you because “no-one really cares” about other opinions when they “don’t make sense” to YOU – well, what a boring would we would live in. Perhaps like Communist China.

Did you not read the review? This phone is a warmed over bag of crap in every area, even if you ignore the 3D issues.

Funny, just because I like the meme.
But you’re wrong and Gadgeteer21 is right – normal consumers couldn’t give a shit about vanilla Android. In fact even a lot of Android geeks/enthusiasts prefer Sense ROMs and the like.

Unless they root their phone, in which case they should have AOSP Jellybean ROMs within a couple of weeks of the Nexus having it.

No he means he’d like to customise it to fit his personal workflow/usage pattern. And because he can’t do that, he doesn’t like it. It’s a fair and valid point when you’re talking about something you might use hundreds of times a day.

No, these “people” who buy top-end Samsung and HTC handsets are those who want a phone with a bigger screen. You know, for watching video better, playing games better, browsing the web better. The things most people do with a smartphone these days.

There’s less reason to root an Android phone than to jailbreak an iPhone, since Android can do more out of the box and doesn’t have anywhere near as many artificial restrictions placed in the software.

Or they just don’t want an iPhone, since there are many, many reasons to prefer other phones.