Last week my girlfriend, Stef (who I often refer to as Poppy), and I celebrated being together for 4 years. Besides congratulating her on a will of steel and a heart of gold, one of the things we decided during such occasions is to chose something we both want and then get it. Whether it be tickets to a show, a new television or, in this case, new phones.

With our contract at the point of an upgrade we decided it was time to get new phones. My girlfriend on the other hand had decided before we hit the store on the iPhone 4s, leaving her Droid X behind. I was waffling a bit between the Droid Bionic, the soon to be available Droid 4, and the iPhone 4s. As you may be able to tell by the photo, I went iPhone 4s.

This may come as a shock to most of you considering I have been an ardent supporter of the Android platform. I was a proud and early adopter of the original Droid phone, I own an Amazon Kindle Fire that is the most successful Android tablet form to date, and use Google for most of my online tasks such as e-mail and keeping my calendar. Whenever someone talks about an iOS app, I’m usually the one asking where an Android version is.

So how did Apple woo me from the Droid Army into the iCult?

Simply put, performance.

For the last year I’ve noticed my Droid running considerably slower. Sure there were more apps that became more sophisticated, and it showed in the overall performance of the phone. The worst indicator of this was when Foursquare would freeze up while getting my morning coffee after the phone came off a full night of rest. Not only was it frustrating, but it endangered my mayorship.

Battery life was nowhere near where I needed it to be. Even with aggressive battery management I was plugging it in after maybe 1 hour of usage and 3 hours of standby. There were lots of times when the sync function would last for an hour or more, draining the battery even faster.

The absolute worst part was when I would run “Low On Memory“. I was unable to move memory hogs like Facebook and Google+ off the actual phone and onto the mounted SD card that still had plenty of space, so the only solution was to delete apps and lose one function to gain another.

In the end, Droid wasn’t what I was looking for. I needed something that would be responsive and perform throughout the life of the contract. Having the Droid was, for all intense purposes, the same as owning a PC. It was good for the first year but the hardware was quickly outpaced by the software and there really wasn’t much I could do about it.

Is the iPhone 4s the Droid I’m looking for? Even the all knowing and wise Siri isn’t sure. It’s too early to really tell, although thus far things are VERY promising.

I haven’t had a power management issue, I’m running apps quickly, there are no memory issues to worry about, and the phone hasn’t frozen yet. The worst part was losing all the contacts in the phone, but truth be told I’m okay with re-adding them and NOT syncing it to my Google contact list, which is significantly large to say the least.

The fact is in two years we’ll have an opportunity to change again. Whether I stay in the iCult for my phone will really depend on how the performance is over the next two years. Hopefully Apple delivers on the hype and I will be another mindless happy consumer.

Stay tuned…