nemof.org lost in the forest, dwelling with the badgers

Android. I'm not really fussed about the morality of it, but from a practical viewpoint, I think that in the future - not now - Android will surpass iOS in functionality, usefulness and other ways.

There are several key points to think about when comparing iOS and Android.

1) *Devices* - To me this is one of the most significant advantages that android has over iOS. It may also become one of the greatest problems Google has to deal with as they try and heard handset makers together to stop fragmentation, but not being tied into a single handset is great and a significant part of why I went Android. I also believed there would be more potential for hackability due to the backing of Google and its company ethos.

On the other hand, the iPhone 4 is definitely one of, if not the best handsets out there at the moment, in terms of sheer design quality. The _Retina Display_ is beautiful, and better than any screen currently available on an android handset.

2) *Jailbreak vs Root* - This is an interesting one as it relates to the openness of a given device.

Everyone who is any kind of tech-head resents the way that Apple has locked down their iOS devices. With an upcoming change in iOS 5 in how restore blobs are handled, it's going to make it much harder to *Jailbreak* your iOS device.

Why is it so important to Apple that you don't crawl out of the sandbox? They believe in the walled garden mentality, and why not, it's working for them. They are now the biggest music seller in the world, and probably the largest provider of digital downloads of TV and Movies too.

Keeping you locked into this closed ecosystem where you can't even install software that's not approved by them (using an extremely opaque and somewhat discriminatory process of selection) is in their interest, and they’ll go to great lengths to make sure you cant use your device as you see fit.

Things in the Android world are in this respect, a lot better, however there have been some cracks in the opensource dream recently, but to their credit in Google I/O 2011 developer conference Google did a lot to address this issue along with fragmentation.

For android handsets, the equivalent of jailbreaking is *Rooting*. Why would you ever need to root your android phone you ask, surely as they’re open source we can do whatever we want with them? Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. If you bought a google phone like the Nexus S, then rooting is extremely easy, but if you bought a phone from another handset maker, then to use that old adage, YMMV.

Why this disparity between handset makers, networks even, and what do you get out of rooting your handset?

Well, the reasons to root/jailbreak are many. With iOS it gives you a much more fine grained control of the system, allowing you to do things which Apple have proclaimed unclean. However, with Android you can take this a step further and flash custom firmware based on the Android OpenSource Project (AOSP) including ROMs like Cyanogenmod. I recently installed on my HTC Desire HD and really appreciate the extra functionality that it’s brought to my phone. There are dozens of similar ROMs available for Android, and in that respect I’d compare it to all the a many delicious flavours of Linux we’re lucky to have today.

To touch on the point regarding Android handset makers and networks, this is incredibly important. When choosing a phone, pay attention to the information on the web regarding its hackability. In future iterations of their products some phone-makers have decided to make it much harder to bypass security and root their phones, as to why, I cannot fathom the thought process. The same goes for carriers, when you purchase a phone through a network. If it’s network branded, there’s a greater chance of it being locked down to that network in several ways, making it harder for you to _own_ your handset.

3) *User Interface* - This is an extremely subjective and emotive subject, and of varying importance to people. I’ll discuss this in two parts, aesthetics and practicality.

*Aesthetics*

Hands down winner here, for me is iOS. It’s a far more beautiful and well developed OS then Android, modded or otherwise. What makes it so much better? Apple have the best usability and user interface designers in the industry, along with stringent and well thought about rules regarding how they are implemented. This carries over to the iOS appstore, meaning that when apps are designed, they need to meet certain requirements to be accepted.

iOS is just far more mature than Android in this respect. We also have (what I feel is Googles most serious problem) the issue of Artists vs Engineers. Apple are artists, Google as we are well familiar with, are engineers. Their approach to Android has been very much from a technical viewpoint, and the beauty of the user interface and how it works, has suffered as a result. I feel like they are slowly catching up, and I will admit that lots of people enjoy the sparse cleanness of Google interfaces, but on a personal level, I hold my head in my hands when Google introduces a feature like the G+ black bar across the top of all their websites, or the play later queue bar on youtube.

*Practicality*

Really, these two things are interwined. Apples brilliant UI design works towards making their devices easier to use. _*They just work*_.

It’s definitely important to think about how your phone will interact with your other devices though. Will you be syncing it with your PC on a regular basis? I’d assume so, as such then, you need to think about whether you want the what many consider the bane, iTunes installed on your system? There are certainly other options when it comes to syncing your iDevice, but iTunes offers the most functionality and management ability.

I personally have no gripe with iTunes, it works OK on the PC, and very well on the Mac. It is however amazing to realise that Apple still haven’t made iTunes a fully native Mac OS X product by converting it to Cocoa. Current rumours are that 10.5 will go 64bit means it must be going cocoa, but that remains to be seen.

I’m slightly jealous of my iOS device cousins and their complete solution for managing their devices. Why? Because there’s little to no official software for doing the same for my Android handset. If I want to back up my device including contacts, apps and settings, then the whole process is much more complicated then clicking a button in iTunes.

With the Cloud’s now covering the skies, it could be said I don’t really need to worry about stuff like that, after all my contacts should all _just be there_ on my google account, automagically. Call me pragmatic, but I just like knowing that I can create a nice restore image of my phone that I can roll back to when I want. This is possible with rooting, but it shouldn’t have to be that hard.

4) *Conclusion*

I think that there’s no clear winner in iOS vs Android at the moment. Apple have the better hardware, and in several ways their software is a much more polished product than Android.

On a day to day basis I still have several niggles with my handset, but a lot of them (like sketchy wireless) went away when I rooted it. I got  rid of HTC sense (the manufacturer UI on top of Android) and replaced it with Cyanognemod. This shouldn’t have to be the case, and I shouldn’t have to root my phone and manually delete its battery stats in a terminal just to make it have a reasonable life, but unfortunately this is the current state of play for Android, or for my handset at least.

If you want to be future thinking and invest in a device that is already good and will only get better over time then get an Android phone. There are some great handsets on their way from companies like Google, HTC and Samsung which suit any number of preferences. After all, not everyone likes soft keyboards.

There are many reasons to recommend an iOS device. If you’re not an opensource evangelist and you’re really not fussed about your device beyond it working, working well and being practical, useful and beautiful then get an iPhone. I’d recommend waiting till September to see if Apple announces the iPhone 5. They are currently in the ‘tock’ of their development cycle, meaning that we’re not expecting to see massive changes, but it might mean a reduction in the cost of the iPhone 4, if you don’t mind going for an older handset.

I personally think that Android has a much brighter future, but it is extremely dependent on attracting app developers to the platform, which at the moment simply can’t compare to the Apple appstores variety and quantity.

There’s more I could say, but I really can’t be bothered to go through, read all this copy and correct all the glaring grammar and spelling errors. Hope this helps.