Showdown:
lOS vs Android vs WP7 (Part 1)
Henry
Winchester, Gary Marshall, Dan Grabham and Mary Branscombe size up the big
three mobile operating systems. Which one will be powering your next phone?
Just a few years ago, you could choose
a phone based on the hardware features you wanted. A decent camera or music
playback ability would be enough to sell certain handsets to particular
customers, who were generally content with a locked-down and completely
inflexible experience. After all, they didn’t really have a choice.
Now everything’s changed, and the
phone’s operating system has become its major selling point. We expect
smartphones to be all-singing, all-dancing machines capable of just about
everything, and to a large extent they are. Competition among phone
manufacturers is so fierce, they have to be on the cutting edge. The smartphone
market is dominated by three operating systems: Microsoft’s Windows Phone,
Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Nokia’s Symbian was immensely popular, hut
its user base has dropped and Nokia has moved into producing Windows Phone
devices. All modern smartphone operating systems target consumers, rather than
the business users who were once their sole customers.
Apple pie
Apple had already established itself
as a major player in portable consumer tech with its iPod MP3 players, and the
first iPhone was released in 2007. It combined a lot of then-groundbreaking
technology like multitouch and slick internet access into a form factor that’s
remained largely unchanged, and iOS is the only smartphone operating system
limited to a single manufacturer.
Apple
is famed for its slick designs, and its mobile operating system is no
exception. iOS is intuitive and easy to use, but lacks flexibility
Microsoft has been in the smartphone
arena for over a decade, but Windows Phone devices only hold a one per cent
market share. Microsoft’s first devices were PDA-like pocket PCs, and in these
devices it innovated a lot in the mobile sector with applications like Windows
Messenger, Internet Explorer and Office. Microsoft’s most recent mobile
operating system, Windows Phone 7, was released last year.
Android began life in 2003 as a
start-up company with the aim of creating a fluid, cutting-edge phone operating
system. The company was bought by Google in 2005, and the first Android-powered
smartphone, HTC’s Dream, was released in 2008. From here the OS went on to
appear in hundreds of different smartphones, as well as tablets and c-readers.
Android is also the bestselling smart
phone operating system, with over 107 million units shipping in the second
quarter of 2011 Apple lags behind with a mere 20 million units shipped, but
that’s still enough to make it the second largest smartphone provider in the
world. Thanks to Apple’s internet-savvy approach, 59 per cent of North American
mobile web access is via iOS devices.
Microsoft has the biggest battle on
its hands. Despite its established name, it shipped just 1.5 million Windows
Phone 7 units during the second quarter of 2011 - down 52 per cent against
shipments for the same period of last year. Its latest 7.5 update, known as
Mango, aims to reinvigorate the brand, but it might not be enough.
Sales data is great for establishing
who is dominant in the smartphone market, but it’s the phone experience that
shifts units. There are a whole range of elements to consider, from internet
connectivity to 3D capabilities and the device’s overall look and feel. There
are also more reticent features to consider, such as whether or not the onboard
memory is expandable, or if the device is open to viruses and exploits.
Choose your apps
The biggest single area to consider is
apps. Initially launched by Apple in 2008, these small programs add versatility
to the device and let you do everything from zombify photos of loved ones to
navigate city streets via GPS. They’re not to be underestimated, either - there
are a whopping 500,000 apps on the iOS App Store, and the company is nearing
its 10 billionth download.
That’s a big selling point, and a big
business for those involved in making apps. Although there are more Android
phones out there, the Android Market lags behind the App Store. However, with
250,000 apps and 4.5 billion downloads, it’s catching up fast - and 57 per cent
of its applications are free compared to the App Store’s 28 per cent.
Windows Phone 7.5 devices only have
just over 33,000 apps available to them on the Windows Phone Marketplace, which
is partly due to the freshness of the platform, and also because of Microsoft’s
stricter quality control. Although the Apple and Android stores may have
hundreds of thousands of apps, it’s can be hard to pick from the swathes of
dodgy ones. Apple in particular does its best to filter out poorer quality
programs, but the virtual flotsam and jetsam remains.
The lack of quality control has a
knock-on effect on the apps themselves, and means it’s very hard for new apps
to establish themselves unless they have significant backing. More seriously,
malware programmers can disguise their applications as real ones and access
information like the phone’s IMEI number and user ID. This is exactly what
happened with the DroidDream trojan, although its exploits were subsequently patched
by Google.
Look, feel, features
If Apple brought anything to the
smartphone market, it was a ludicrous amount of polish. The original iPhone was
an incredible, award-winning piece of design, and its brushed metal and glass
casing made it feel like it belonged decades in the future. Of course, all other
phone manufacturers had to catch up; any Android or Microsoft-powered handset
now also feels weighty and slick, although nothing quite matches the tactility
of an iPhone.
But the weight and materials of a
phone are only the beginning - the OS has to operate smoothly, present detailed
information in a small amount of space, and look flashy without being overly
complex. And it has to do all this while consuming as little memory as
possible.
iOS 5 — the latest update to iPhones —
brings with it a number of new features, including Android-style notifications
and instant camera accessibility from the lock screen. The browser, which is
increasingly important, has also been updated to include a clear reading layout
for web pages, as well as tabbed browsing for multiple windows.
The heart of iOS 5 is iCloud, Apple’s
free (for the first 5GB at Ieast cloud storage service. It does some genuinely
useful things, including wireless backups and automatic synchronisation between
your various devices, hut watch what you select — we enabled backup on an
iPhone and iPad, and ended up storing so much data, Apple emailed us and
suggest we start buying more space.
Google
has benefited and suffered as a result of making its operating system open
source
The other big innovation is Sin, the
result of millions of dollars’ worth of research. It’s a voice recognition
system partnered with an artificial intelligence powerful enough to (just
about) understand what you’re saying and give you instant answers. You can ask
it to remind you about a friend’s birthday, or (if you live in the US) to
provide directions to the nearest petrol station, or tell you how far from
Earth a certain star is. Google’s Voice Search is similar, hut less advanced.
