iPhone + Windows 8 Bay Bridge tablet - the sweet spot

[omniusovermind]

I'm a big believer in diversifying your electronic gadget portfolio as long as the devices all play fairly nice with each other. Locking yourself into one single ecosystem just doesn't offer many incentives in today's fast paced mobile tech industry because none the major players offer you a level of integration so tight that there are any clear advantages. They try to tighten things up using proprietary cloud services and email but to be honest neither hold any clear or earth shattering advantages over the independent players out there, ie. Dropbox as just one example. There's also very little stopping you from using Gmail on a Windows device. With that in mind I think I've hit the sweet spot for a platform agnostic approach to mobile devices for 2013-2014:

Smartphone: iPhone 5. Best track record for the last 3+ years solid in hardware and OS reliability and customer satisfaction and still remains the #1 platform for developers and the best app store on the planet. The only company that enjoys NO carrier interference for OTA updates. Zero fragmentation.

Tablet: I'm convinced that once the Bay Bridge CPU's are inside of full version of Windows 8 tablets this year(meaning not RT) that's going to be a slam dunk. iPads are great tablets but at the end of the day a mobile OS can't compete with being able to have full computing power and full sized computer applications on a tablet form factor while also getting the better battery life of traditional tablets. This is one area where Apple badly needs to catch up.

I'm envisioning my next 18 months minimum so far as consisting of an iPhone and one of the upcoming Windows 8 Tablets running a Bay Bridge processor as my two main mobile devices.

 

[Daniel Ratcliffe]

Sweet. Gotta admit though I'm a fan of unifying myself to an ecosystem. For example I use the Xbox Music Pass (reason enough to be WP for now), I also make use of MS Office, SkyDrive, et al. I've got an Xbox 360 also. In essence, it just unifies the whole experience, for me anyway. But your post was insightful and a good read. As for me, I've zero interest in Win8 Pro, and would much prefer RT. But I need that stylus, as displayed by me getting the GNote8.0 (soon), then again I can get a 3G model of that which would help with accessing the full WPCentral site to go about my moderator duties. So it has its advantages there.

 

[poiman]

I'm the opposite. On phones I use Windows Phone, on tablets I use iOS.

 

[theefman]

Cant see myself using IOS unless Microsoft completely messes up WP. Even then Nokia is my preferred phone maker so i'll still be WP unless they move to something else so for me, its a Lumia Next + Surface 2 x86 of some kind.