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It started off at around 100% so the only place you can go from there if you move at all is down.

Apple's charging users for:
- security, which Android users don't seem to "get"
(in more ways than one)
- compatibility: by far more apps run on iPad/iPhone than
any other handheld today or in history (Android has grown
but still has far fewer apps, and its apps are subject to
balkanization due to the cacophony of different screen
sizes, which are not okay at small physical sizes and
resolutions but only at larger ones)
- one of the less threatened/threatening platforms regarding
intellectual property rights [so far as is obvious, anyway]

That said, Java is a pretty spiffy programming language, so Android has that going in its favor.

Android being built on Java is a bit of a risk, however, as Oracle seems to feel it is not getting its financial due from Google. Java is open source, but you can't leave out required packages and say you are still in compliance with the license, it seems.

It Oracle forces Google to remove Java from Android, there go all of the Android apps. They are written in Java and they call Java system libraries. The apps platform would be vaporized and Android would have to start over.

Would app developers go for Go if Java hits the road and leaves Android? Unclear. Maybe. But would users/consumers wait for a new app catalog to be built up from zero?

Apple is not much more expensive if you are looking at apps. If you are paying for black plastic, then sure. But go buy a paper weight then, it's a better investment.

A pretty sane approach to buying any electronic device is to figure out how short an amount of time the _shortest_ of these two things is:

- How long would you want to use it for?
- How long before the batteries die and I need to replace them/it?
- How long before I cannot update it with new/safe software?

Then ask yourself the following:

- How much money am I going to spend on things to make this
thing work (units, options, warranties, repairs) or not
work (e.g. third party antivirus bandages)?

Divide that up by the number of months you think you will use the product.

Apple's price come out not that much more than Android's.

If you're an experienced computing & consumer electronics customer/user, then you might also want to look at your "per decade" cost for each different platform, assuming you are not going to hop from one to another.

- How much of my investment (apps, data, money spent) will
transfer over to whatever product I replace this one with
a few years from now?

If you change to a semi-incompable or totally incompatible platform every few years, you are probably ringing up costs you would not otherwise face.

Android hardware seems pretty different from one model and make to the next. Differences for the sake of differences just add cost and/or incompatibility.

Android apps in the official & community 'marketplace' stores have ripped people off, as it appears getting a trojan banking app into either one is not very hard. Google's scrutiny must be lacking where protecting huge sums of other people's money is involved, and those people are just Android customers is all.

So Android has premium costs and inconvenience, for people [and companies who are people] not in the last few years of their life.

I am not going to furnish answers to all those questions above. Only the prospective consumer (or enterprise) can supply the correct answers for them, and only if their planning/projecting/prognostication is pretty good. **

People need to _judge_ all the platforms; the commitment of the platform owning/making stakeholders, the commitment of app developers, and the commitment of consumers which helps sustain those commitments. It is worth dwelling on.

** Judging from accuracy of tech blogs on predicting "future products," hopefully they are not in journalism field. :-D

When someone says that there is an "Apple premium" or an "Apple tax" they likely don't know what they are talking about. It is best to have a good framework in front of you for doing comparative shopping.

A parrot and a newspaper article go together to produce only one thing. Parrot droppings.

If guys like that were right, Zune would be a top-selling MP3 player, Kin Zune-based phone would have been on the market for more than a few weeks, nobody would ever successfully hack Windows, Windows hacking would have gotten milder & less frequent as its & IE market share slid downward, code-generating 4GL languages requiring no programming skills would have blown conventional programming languages away, and we would all still be programming in C/C++.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.

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