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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alan Shutko" data-source="post: 5442826" data-attributes="member: 23694">I'm an iPhone 4 user.  Over the last six months, my data usage has ranged from 112MB (a low month with much of the time spent in the hospital welcoming my new son) to 600MB.  I don't stream music or video, mostly email, web browsing, and forums with the Forumrunner app.If you use pandora or tether, you will use up data fast.My wife uses minimal email and web browsing and is usually around 30-40MB a month on an iPhone 3G.  Purchasing mp3s, ringtones, etc definitely count againt your usage on the iPhone.  There may be carriers who have a captive store that do not charge for that data, but I don't know.The carriers I know of (Sprint, AT&T and Verizon) do not apply most discounts to data plans.  But you can decrease your phone bill that way.Most smartphones will let you sync music and video to your phone.  The mechanism differs.  iPhones sync with iTunes.  Blackberries, Android and Windows Phone devices use different software.  The iPhone comes with 16 or 32GB of built-in storage and is not expandable.  Other phones usually come with a small amount of internal storage and can use SD cards of some size to expand it.  Often there are limitations on what can be put on the cards: some phones limit you from putting apps on there or make it more difficult.Think about where your media is coming from.  Music is pretty standard and any phone will play the common formats.  But if you have a lot of DRMed music from the old days in the iTunes store, or from another store like Audible or maybe Zune, make sure the device you get supports them.In my experience, the iPhone has probably the easiest to use media integration but other phones ship with more flexibility.A big draw of smartphones are the apps.  iPhone has the biggest selection of apps and you will find an app for almost anything.  Android is next biggest and the selection is improving.  You can also find some apps that are not allowed on the Apple App Store (notably emulators for old game systems).  Windows Phone 7 has a small store but some good apps since MS courted big developers.  Other smartphones are an app wasteland.You want a phone with a capacitive touch screen.  They may be slightly more expensive than some other models, but they are much more responsive and pleasant to use.Ok, that's my attempt to give reasonably impartial info.  Now for my opinion.  I wouldn't buy anything but an iPhone.  The UI is more polished and faster reacting, the apps are better, and the system as a whole works better for more users.  Android is great if you like fiddling with your phone more than using it.  If you want to spend your time reinstalling new and different ROMs on your phone, go Android.  That's not me.  I also think that Apple makes it easier for app writers to write good apps: between the support the frameworks give you and the review process help a lot.  Comparing the work I had to do to write an iPhone app for my company and the work the Android folks did, mine seemed easier and ended up looking better because of platform support.But hey, I'm a Mac head and all my media is in iTunes, so that influences my decision.  YMMV.</blockquote>

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