Is the iPhone Better Than Android?

[Chakravartin]

mrlynn wrote: I'm confused about all the hullabaloo. Is the iPhone any better than the Android? If so, why?

1. The interface is clean and consistent. Android is less about offering the user a good experience and more about offering handset makers a cheap and flexible operating system. Some Android phones are fairly easy to use. Others less so.

2. There are more and generally better apps for iOS. There really is an app for almost anything you'd want to do with your phone. It's easier to develop apps for the iPhone because there's a limited range of hardware to design for and the App Store makes it easy to sell your stuff. When you design for Android, you have to consider the dozens of different different screen sizes, memory, GPUs and CPUs that your app has to accommodate. There are also a half dozen major outlets for software for Android, which might sound good (competition usually favors consumers), but each one uses a different system for purchasing and installing apps and that gets confusing. And because of this apps usually offer a better experience on the iPhone even when they are made for both platforms.

3. It's safer. There's malware for the iOS, but Android is loaded with it.

4. It sync's with your Mac without exposing your private info to 3rd parties. Syncing an Android phone generally requires handing everything over to Google. Some people don't like that idea.

5. The iPhone/iPod dock is almost omnipresent. It's in stereos, receivers, soundbars and automobiles. You could use a minijack cable to connect an Android phone to one of those devices, but the dock lets the device control the phone where the minijack is limited to transmitting audio. It's very convenient for me to plug my phone into my car's stereo system and be able to navigate my playlist from my car's stereo system, controlling it using buttons on the steering wheel.

There are some annoying limitations to the iPhone ecosystem. One that I encounter frequently is the fact that Bluetooth file exchange is disabled in the iOS. This means that the most common way to exchange contacts (vCards) and files between cell phones doesn't work. If you get a car that has phone-controls you can't transfer your contacts to the car's address book. And (until iOS 5 ships) you're stuck using iTunes whenever you want to sync. And it has that kludged iPod interface that offers almost no control over your playlists from the phone. Mostly small annoyances. No device is perfect for everyone.