It turns out that despite my protestations to the contrary, I may be an Apple fanboy after all.

I wasn’t happy with the simple, non-smart phone I bought at Walgreen’s in March. The sound quality wasn’t great, and everybody here seems to like to “text” a lot, and the simple texting feature on that phone was very 20th century and cumbersome to use.

So I changed my pre-paid GoPhone plan to a smart phone plan and bought an Avail 2 Android 4.1 device for $54 at Target on Sunday. But it was just horrible. The sound quality was better, but it was slower than Moses, and plain didn’t work well. The reception in particular was very poor.

I had originally wanted to use my AU iPhone 5, but was not able to unlock it from AU. So I can only use that phone on wi-fi.

Finally I decided to try my hand on getting hold of an inexpensive, used AT&T iPhone. I found a 16 GB iPhone 4S yesterday on Craig’s List for just $120!

The AT&T store here was very cooperative and gave me a free SIM card for it, so I could continue with my current GoPhone plan (unlimited talk and text, plus 2.5 GB of data for $60/month), and even transferred over my Android contacts for me. I returned the Android to Target today for a refund. (One thing I like about shopping in the U.S. is that it’s a lot easier to return things. In Japan, it tends to be more difficult to return something that isn’t actually broken.)

Anyway, it works just fine. It’s about 500 times faster than the painfully slow operating Android device. It’s used, and looks a somewhat used, but everything works fine and I guess I am just more comfortable with the Apple ecosystem. It was nice to see all my photos, calendars, reminders, etc. just automatically be there via iCloud.

It’s one version older than my iPhone 5, but the camera is more or less the same quality.

The battery is a bit old, and doesn’t hold charge as long as a new one, but I bought a recommended $10 do-it-yourself replacement battery kit from Amazon and will update that when it arrives.

Anyway, it’s nice to have a contract-free iPhone to use in the U.S. The texting is integrated with the Messages app, which works a lot better than the texting feature on the Android as well.