Why my Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone

Is that true with current devices? Absolutely not. Gingerbread suffers from zero of the complaints that you mentioned.

"I had a task killer installed. It was my most frequently used app."

You should probably remove this from your post because it betrays that you are an ignorant user. All else follows from that.

While you have edited your post here to temper the zeal, comments like "Android just replaces feature phones" are, well, "fanboy" type comments. Tell my Galaxy S II that.

You're angry about something and are taking it out on Android. No one should draw much from your dated observations.

This story is about a bad device, possibly even a defective handset. Call the press, someone got a lemon!

I've had 4 Android devices, all the ways back to cupcake on the G1. In the early years I absolutely saw the issues that the GP observed, tolerating the platform for secondary reasons while hoping it would get better. I, too, had to pull my battery to end a call more than once. Until Froyo I never recommended Android to non-tech friends or peers. With a modern Gingerbread device I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

But...wow...reading their post is like a blast from the past. jm4 seems to have a really bad sense of timing "buy high sell low!" because Android today is a slick, smooth, reliable platform.

Somewhat broad generalization ahead...

About once a year, Apple comes out with ONE new phone, an iPhone. If the phone is bad, Apple goes out of business. Apple bets the company every year on that new iPhone, and to make that a reasonable bet, they spend tons and tons of marketing on design, engineering, quality, and customer support. Apples knows a bad iPhone makes WSJ / New York Times front pages. Apple knows that to make a bad iPhone loses them iPad, iPod, Macbook,... customers.

And so ... by and large, Apple does not make bad iPhones.

In contrast

Four times a year, each, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Huawei, Sony, and others, come out with a new Android phone. This phone is one of many many products made by each of these companies. The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs. Losing a customer here is bad, but does not carry the long term cost as losing a customer at Apple does.

And so there is very little incentive to make anything but competitive (in all the wrong meanings) phones here. There is a race to the bottom mentality going on.

"We think the phone we make is good, at least as good as the phone they make. Let's get some more marketing dollars from our partners for it and we will all be happy"

For people like you, who want to be able to plug their phone into their Linux box and access their data - Android in its current state is a fantastic operating system.

For people like the author's mother (and my mother actually) who want their phones to "just work", Android in its current state isn't living up to its potential.

I have no doubt that if Apple allowed manufacturers and carriers to use whatever hardware they wanted, and install whatever apps they want on the iPhone, iOS would have exactly the same issues.

I bought the MyTouch3G (2nd Android phone ever), the G2, the Nexus S and recently the Galaxy Tab. Overall, I'm very happy with the experience of each of these phones. There are other phones out there that have great experiences as well. As a consumer, I will research these purchases which matter and will pay with my time to get exactly what I want. If you want to, instead, pay for one company to handle quality end-to-end for you, then you will pay for that, too.

For me, the pluses in Android outweigh the (few) minuses (that remain).

For anyone else, it's great that they have the choice to make. :)