Why are you switching to Android from the iPhone?

So far three of my friends and two of my co-workers have switched from iPhones and purchased Android based phones, why is that? What is so compelling? Is AT&T to blame? Are the restrictions that AT&T set in place with Apple limiting innovation?

To be perfectly honest I’m an Apple fanboy, I switched years ago and most of my computers in our home are Macs (or pretending to be Apple hardware). Both my wife and I have iPhones (my wife still has a 3G and I have a 4) my kids have feature phones with cheap yet limited internet access. I listen to podcasts and music and use my phone all the time to look things up. I have many iPhone accessories both for the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4 and have bought quite a few apps in the App Store. With all that said I have quite a bit invested in iPhones, accessories and apps. I like the selection of apps that the iPhone App Store vs what I’ve seen in the Android Marketplace, it seems pretty limiting at the moment.

The things I like about the Android OS is the ability to create a wifi hotspot and how well it integrates with all of the Google apps. My iphone works well with my gmail accounts and my contacts and calendar sync up without any problems but I’d have to jailbreak my phone in order to enable wifi hotspot functionality or forfeit my unlimited internet access to tether my laptop to the iPhone 4.

So did you switch to or purchase an Android based device? If so, why?

If you’re one of my friends or not after reading this please take a moment and let me know why you switched in the comments below.