Is Android better than the iPhone OS? My personal oppinion

Introduction

Mac OS X is my favorite OS out there so the announcement of the iPhone OS back in 2007 was breath taking for me. I imported the first generation of the iPhone at the end of 2007 and was impressed by it’s intuitive interface and I still am. But there were some features missing like copy/paste or MMS (which I never use.. so it wasn’t something I missed much).

A year later Apple announced a new Version of the iPhone OS and introduced system wide copy/paste, mms and other new features. It doesn’t matter if you like Apple or not, compared to it’s competitors it was a huuuge step forward, NONE of them was able to offer an alternative as good as the iPhone OS.

Of course there were some other phones with touchscreens, some of them even with multitouch but they were laggy or the interface was just crap. On the spec they had better hardware, but with the iPhone Apple has proved that Software is the most important part of a phone, and not a 12Mpx camera or a faster CPU.

Android for the masses

In 2009 Google introduced Android 1.5. I downloaded th SDK and used the emulator to play around with the OS but wasn’t impressed that much after all. There was just not enough eye-candy or features to impress me, not sure what the real problem was but for me it was not an alternative to my iPhone.

During one year, more and more Android devices where released and it wasn’t possible to ignore the fact that Google has built a real competitor to the iPhone, as a technology enthusiast I downloaded the Android SDK and tried Android 2.0 and my first thought was WOW! Android was finally usable (I ignore the fact here that HTC created a really nice Home replacement with its Sense UI).

Motorola Milestone (EU version of the Droid)

After two years with the iPhone I bought the Motorola Milestone which shipped with Android 2.0 after a month Motorola released 2.0.1 which solved many bugs (Camera focus … ). For now I can say I like the device and I like Android, with a few exceptions.

I like it but…

1. Copy / Paste available, but why not in the Gmail application?! Unbelievable this still doesn’t work. So it’s not possible to copy text from an email, that’s really annoying!
2. Copy / Paste is not intuitive at all, here’s the way to copy and paste from a web page: 1. hardware button settings, 2. click on more, 3. click select text, 4. try to mark the text and let’s hope you don’t miss some text! because if you did you can’t change the selection it automatically copies the text if it’s right or not, you have to restart the whole process if you missed something! Compared to the iphone: 1. double tab the text, 2. change your selection, 3. click copy.
3. Market Bug (Motorola specific).. unable to set notifications for new Updates, Market crashes
4. I think the user interface was designed by a developer, not many nice icons, it looks like a huge patchwork, eye candy is definitely missing
5. Way too many settings
6. No breadcrumbs or labeled back buttons; on the iPhone you have this little button on the top left with a label, I mean you can go to settings -> iPod , then the button has the label “Settings” on the android theres just nothing you have to navigate back with the hardware button  on the screen you can’t see your position there’s just a title of the current  screen  … have fun with nested settings … *back, back, back, back, back, back … *

Is Android better than the iPhone OS?

Well we can’t say it’s better or worser than the iPhone OS. Yeah it has some strange behaviours and bugs, but in the end you get an OS which is unbelievable flexible you can replace the default apps and customize the homescreen as you wish, and if you like you can even replace the home app.  And you can change the background of the home screen (take that iPhone!).

But I wouldn’t recommend Android devices to my mother or father, I think they would be overwhelmed by it’s flexibility. All technology interested people with a basic understanding of computers and the WILL to play around with the phone until it fits their needs will be happy with the device, for all others I still recommend the iPhone.

[Via http://blog.lipp.ws]