A few months ago i had the pleasure of getting to know the Android SDK and got to create a prototype Android game. For this reason I got to use a HTC Magic running a standard Android 1.6 or Donut as its known to the Android community. I have since rooted the phone and flashed the ROM with several community created ROMs. I had a ROM running HTC’s Sense User Interface(UI) , which is a layer on top of the standard Android UI. Since then I got tasked with creating an iPhone application and obviously I would need to use a iPhone as development phone. At this stage it dawned on me that nowhere on the tech blogs have I read a blog post describing a Android user having to adjust to the iPhone OS.
As the iPhone I got is the original iPhone I cannot compare the hardware as the iPhone 2G is about a year and a half older than the HTC Magic. What I can compare is the operating system though ( OS ) as the iPhone is updated to the very latest 3,12 version.
Mail, Calendar & Contacts
Before you do anything on Android it asks for your gmail account. As soon as your email credentials are confirmed your gmail, contacts and calendar start to synchronise. Any changes are synchronised between the google servers and your phone. What’s best is that gmail has push email similiar to the Exchange Activesync process or the Blackberry solution. Speaking of Exchange, the ROM’s I intalled came with the Exchange mail clients, making it easy to have work emails and calendar events pushed to your phone.
After booting the iPhone the first thing I did was click on the mail icon on the springboard. The google account was easy to configure and the account connected first time as expected. Then I was left a bit confused as to how to add the Exchange email account. After a bit of fiddling around I found the mail settings section where I could add the exchange account. It worked first time and push notifications was set “on” as default. The iPhone email account for gmail does not support push, instead the email client periodically checks the server for any new emails.
Exchange calendar and contacts are automatically synced to the iPhone calendar application. Unfortunately the same is not true for the gmail calendar and contacts.
Browser
The iPhone sports a mobile Safari which is super fast. The two browsers load speeds are more or less on par. Browser rendering is also about the same, where the only difference is that the Android browser has an option to reformat the layout to fit the width of the browser. Safari does not do this but it has a very good scaling feature: pinch to zoom. It uses multi-touch gestures to scale the browser. The response is quite fast, even on the older hardware, and it gives the Safari browser an advantage over the Android browser which only offers scaling by using buttons.
User Interface
The iPhone user interface is well thought out. I found the small animations and attention to details very helpful. The navigation is equally well thought out, letting one know that you headed into or out of a section. The one thing that makes this user interface works well is that almost all applications use the Cocoa standard UI elements, so navigation elements are generally consistent.
Because Android has physical menu and back buttons at the bottom it took me some time getting used to the navigation buttons within the iPhone apps. I grew frustrated as I kept hitting the bottom physical button on the iPhone to go back and got sent to the home screen.
I feel that the Android physical keys are quite useful as it gives the applications a standard way to navigate in and out of sections within the application as well as between applications.
One thing I did find annoying was the way that the iPhone OS had you navigate between applications. Since the iPhone does not support multitasking between 3rd party applications, you can run only one applications at a time. This improves the speed of the applications themselves, but at the same time prevents you from running applications in the background. This is a big let down for me and is actually a deal breaker.
Applications
The Apple App store is a much richer experience than the Android App market. It has much more applications , almost a 100 000 more. Because of this large number of applications there is an equally large number of high quality applications. I found quite a few duplicates between the two application stores showing that developers are creating apps for both platforms.
One thing that bothered me was that I had to sign up with my credit card before I could install any applications.
Apple applications are well designed and in some cases have much better features than their Android counterparts. The Apple applications have at least double the number of options that the Android version have.
Finally
After spending about a week with an iPhone as my main phone I feel seriously disconnected. When I want to know if I have an email I have to unlock the phone and check the home screen. It does not have an alert light telling me when I have message . Yes, it does give a vibrate and an alert sound, but sometimes I don’t hear or feel those alerts. When in an application and you get an alert you would have to quit the application to go the home screen to check what the alert was for. Android’s notification system is a lot more elegant. Android has a top drawer that has alert icons pop up when they arrive, you can then slide down this drawer to see more information and when pressed it would send you directly to the application.
I enjoy the nice user interface but that does not compensate for the lack of multitasking ability, or for the poor notification system.
If Apple wants to keep the iPhone as one of the top smartphone OS’s in the future it will seriously have to rethink its notification system as well as the multitasking capabilities for 3rd party applications.
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February 11th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
“Exchange calendar and contacts are automatically synced to the iPhone calendar application. Unfortunately the same is not true for the gmail calendar and contacts.”
If you configure gmail as an Exchange account, you can sync contacts and calendar (http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252). But the iPhone can’t sync to more than one Exchange server at a time
February 11th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I tried that but it requires a jailbroken iphon, ssh installed, then copy over a config file, edit it and copy your exchange section , then copy it back to your phone and voila! except it didnt work and way too much trouble to get gmail to push.
Its gmail, google calendar and google contacts sync out the box for Android