I'll agree that Android is the more diverse ecosystem for hardware selection and that has pluses as well as minuses.
If you want an Android phone with a real keyboard, there's 20 to choose from, if you want one with a large 4" or bigger touch screen, there's 5 or 6 different models out right now, if you want one with an HDMI port, there's several of them, if you want to wifi tether to your laptop, a bunch do that too. By restricting to a couple models of hardware, Apple's accessories ecosystem has a lot more selection since there are 100's of case choices that all fit the same form factor.
Along with the diversity of hardware comes manufactures pushing out junk hardware along with the good stuff, I don't know what phone darkaegisagain's dockmate had, but there are some pretty crappy low end Android phones like the HTC Eris, LG Ally, Motorola Cliq, etc that crash whenever you throw any decent app at them. They are priced as such, free to $50 which is usually a good sign to avoid them. The old adage,"You get what you pay for" is really true in Android phones.
As for the comments regarding the speed, that hasn't been true... ever actually, I couldn't find ONE article showing a speed difference between equivalent apps on both platforms and in my own testing of multiple apps on both platforms, I haven't seen any real speed differences either. But even less true now than in 2009 when your article is linked (which is showing gen 1 Android phones, btw). The Android Dalvik executes JAVA interpreted code, but that's only one way to build an app on Android (not that it's much of a factor on speed like you imply with the 1ghz to 80mhz scenario, the Android Dalvik is actually extremely fast). The Android NDK which allows developers to write native code has been available for almost 2 years now (
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk). Developers have the choice of using either method or even mixing libraries to optimize performance while still developing much more rapidly using JAVA and the Android SDK than having to write native code for their entire application.
Anyway, I'm not trying to say iPhone is bad or even a worse choice than Android, don't get me wrong, I just didn't like the implication that there's nothing available on Android and it's an inferior hardware choice. There are plenty of sailing/boating apps on Android, some are really great, some aren't. I'd say right now, today, there are more high quality sailing apps on iOS than on Android since developers have had a year longer to write iOS apps than Android. Will that continue be true in a year, now that
Android marketshare is above iOS..... stay tuned.
