Wait. Just a little bit. That’s the advice I recently gave my brother-in-law and his wife. Both of them are rocking OG Droids and are looking to upgrade. They said that one of them could upgrade today, and the other could upgrade in January.
All indications are that the next version of Android–called Ice Cream Sandwich–will be coming out in about a month. By the start of the Christmas shopping season, phones and tablets will start shipping with ICS.
If you buy one now, it could be a year or more before you get the update (*cough*Samsung*cough). Even when you do get the update, your old phone may still have some features that will make using the new version confusing (like hardware buttons for back, home, menu, and search–all of which will be rendered obsolete).
So be patient. Buying a phone today is a lot like buying a computer 10 years ago–by the time you buy it, it’s already obsolete. Wait as long as you can and buy the most phone you can afford at the time. My Nexus One was the fastest phone in the world when it came out, and it’s already showing it’s age 18 months after it was introduced (NFC? Dual Core? Front facing camera? What are these new-fangled things!). While I would love to go out and buy a new Samsung Galaxy S II phone, I am waiting for the next Nexus phone.
In the days of modern technologies one must think more like cars and guns. Sure the latest Gen-4 Glock 21 just hit the market…but my 1911 works just fine (and my 1911 is a wiz-bang 1911, an oldschool all-steel one, or an less old aluminum gun both would work just fine)
Same with cars, The next model year might have a better interior and 15 more HP under the hood…but does it really matter much on your daily commute?
My Droid 2 is most certainly showing its age compared to the next gen, but when I’m sitting on my ass and playing with my phone I’m as close to 100% satisfied as I could hope to be, so I’ll keep pushing this baby until it starts falling apart, and then I’ll upgrade, and not worry too much about pecker-checking the next phone too much.
Weer’d: If it was like the difference between Froyo and Gingerbread, I would probably agree with you – especially since rooting and flashing a custom ROM is pretty easy with most phones (I had Gingerbread on my LG Optimus S a couple of months ago, even though Sprint only started pushing it this past week, and I hesitated quite a while). But ICS is supposed to have some pretty significant changes. My understanding is that they are integrating a lot of the features and concepts from Honeycomb (the tablet version of Android), along with a lot of under the hood changes.