I have both a "new iPad" and an Android Phone (an HTC G2, which is stuck in Gingerbread and is not exactly in its prime.) I am a fairly simple user of both of t

I have both a "new iPad" and an Android Phone (an HTC G2, which is stuck in Gingerbread and is not exactly in its prime.) I am a fairly simple user of both of these: I use a few apps (Twitter and Yelp come to mind, and an app to read reddit) and the stock apps (Google Maps especially on the phone, the browser on both.) Here is my perspective on the two: it doesn't actually matter that much. With iOS, everything looks pretty good and there's a lot of consistency. The browser, I understand, is much better than the browser on my phone (I'm not sure how it stacks up against Chrome for Android, which is not available to me.) But then, iOS is kind of annoying too: the keyboard placement often gets in the way of text fields, there is zero integration in between apps and no way for an app to provide a common service, I have to log in to everything separately. It's very difficult to move within a word (for example, if I typed fold instead of food, it is difficult to change the l to an o.) Every app has its own embedded web browser, which invariably has slight different controls than every other apps embedded web browser. Settings are sometimes bafflingly hidden in some other settings app, rather than being in the actual app you're using. Those things annoy me slightly, but they don't bother me that much when I'm using the device, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my iPad. With Android, apps can provide common services ("Android intents") and they integrate well with one another. There's a back button to move between apps, so apps don't need to do things like embed their own web browser. There's a little nub that I can use to move within a word, so correcting text is much easier. I can use a custom keyboard that is better than both the iOS keyboard (which is admittedly very good), and better than the built-in Android keyboard (which is pretty good, but doesn't have very good autocorrect.) But the thing with Android is that up until recently, it's been very plain and even ugly by default. The default look of an app is pretty ugly (just white text on a black background) so developers seem to try to implement their own style, with varying degrees of success. When the back button works, it's a godsend, but when it doesn't it's really fucking confusing. Animations are often choppy. But mostly none of this actually matters that much, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my Android device.