So, my old, faithful, forgotten-by-HP Palm Pre finally bit the dust, and with no webOS replacement in the foreseeable future with HP's announcement to can mobile products, I finally bit the bullet and went the Android route.  I'm not an "Anything Not Apple" (aka ANA) type of guy, but there is something fundamentally flawed when a $600 product has to be replaced in whole when the battery dies or the OS is more than one year old, and you have to buy everything you put on the device through one distributon channel (can you say serious vendor lock-in?).  Sorry, but one of the things I loved about webOS was the open architecture.  So, long story short, I went with an Android device.

I've been on Sprint for next to forever (anyone else remember when the mobile division was Sprint PCS?), and they've treated me right - and the unlimited data plan is hard to beat.  So, when my contract came up and my trusty Pre bit it, I began reviewing phones.  I almost went to Verizon to get the Samsung Galaxy Nexus with Android 4 on it, but in all the performance reviews (short of raw 4G vs 4GLTE speeds, where Verizon rocks if you're in the right service area) the Samsung Galaxy S2 running Gingerbread 2.3.6 blows it out of the water.  And I'm a power user, so I like performance on a phone.  So I stayed with Sprint (and even with 4G being slower than Verizon's LTE, 6MBps is nothing to sneeze at) and plunked down for the Galaxy S2.  And what a phone!

I've been like a kid in a candy store... Apps galore (there are more free apps in the 'Droid App Market than in the entire webOS catalog), incredible speed (near-instant app loads, fast processing of web pages, overall responsiveness), 8/2MP cameras, and storage (16GB on-board storage + microSD up to 32GB) coupled with a healthy battery make it a road warrior's dream.  Or just an average guy's rocking phone.  Definitely a step up in performance from my poor 1GHz overclocked Pre on an ancient 1.4.5 version of webOS.

Cons so far are that it is a bit larger than most phones on the market, so it fills up a pocket and barely drops into the phone - er, cup holder in my car - but the tradeoff is that gorgeous AMOLED display so I'll manage.  Also, it's been a change in usage habits from webOS where true multitasking and having multiple app cards open and accessible with a simple flick is no longer the case; webOS IMNSHO has a far superior UX to anything out there, which pains me so much to see it being abandoned by the manufacturer.  (I still have and love my two Touchpads and will use them until they are bricks for that very reason.)

So all in all, I'm very impressed with the Galaxy S2, and hope that we see ICS made available on it sometime in the near future.  The Sprint rep wouldn't comment on that beyond stating that Samsung tends to be more conservative on their OS versioning, preferring to use a stable and mature version of Android instead of jumping on the latest bleeding-edge release, which I can appreciate.  That being said, an upgrade might not happen, but at least I know that Android is here to stay and that I will have a migration path when this phone finally goes to the Big Cell Tower in the Sky.  If you'd like to check out the official specs, hit the Samsung page for the Galaxy S2 and see what kind of goodness it has.