Last week Google announced the latest version of its Android operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich. The week before Apple released its latest OS, iOS5, to the public (and winner of the most fun name goes to...). There's already a number of great articles listing the features of both systems (Android:
here, iOS:
here), so Ithought I'd focus on some of the biggest changes and main areas of competition.
Voice controlLet's start with the big one. First a little history. Even if you haven't upgraded to iOS5 yet, your iPhone already supports voice control (for at least everything from 3GS up). That's right, it's already there. For all of Apple’s talk about intuitive controls and gestures, they hide a lot of functionality behind hard-to-guess actions. To access voice control hold down the home button for a least 3 seconds. The control will appear and you can give it a range of different commands, all of which result in you phoning your friend in South America. It even works through the lock screen, meaning your pocket can call South America too (sorry Kate).
The current iteration of Android also supports voice control, though in a very different way. Through the UI are dotted microphone symbols. Tap one and start speaking to see your speech converted to text, and in many cases automatically trigger actions. This can apply to search, visiting a URL in the browser or even dictating whole paragraphs of text in a document. It's not the slickest of tools but it does the job fairly well.
Both operating systems have seen upgrades to voice control. Android’s is the less showy, but I suspect most useful. Dictation is now a lot faster with the system only lagging by a syllable or two at most. It's not public ally available, but I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out.
Apple’s is the all-singing, all-dancing, look at me I'm amazing update, and it's called Siri. Activate Siri in the same way as old voice control (this is my main bug bear with the whole voice approach from Apple. I can open an app and start typing faster than doing the same thing by voice because of the 3s button delay), only now the phone will carry out a much larger range of actions from making appointments, tweeting, adding reminders and more. It will even answer questions you put to it, often in genuinely amusing ways. And yes, it will still phone your friend in South America even through the lock screen.
I've not used Siri yet as its only available on the iPhone 4s (cunning move by Apple there) but at the moment it feels like a gimmick. Sure it's a gimmick that's worked to shift millions of new iPhones, but I'm not convinced, yet, that it marks a major shift in the way we use our phones.
CameraThere’s been some friendly back and forth between Google and Apple on camera speeds (for 'friendly', see 'Christians and lions') with Tim Cook from Apple recently taking a swipe at the delay on Androids between successive snaps, and even in starting the camera in the first place.
Both are now claiming vast improvements in this area, Apple introducing a hardware update of an 8MP camera with 1080p video to the iPhone 4s and a load time of "Oh look that's pretty I'll just start my phone camera and take a picture of it before the moment is lost to eternity. Done", whilst the Android software update will reduce the lag between photos to approximately "Awww, sure would be nice to get another shot before it changes and I spend my life living in a permanent state of regret. Done".
Who wins? Who cares. Anything’s got to be better than my iPhone 3GS (for those keeping track, I've now learnt German and Spanish while waiting for the damn thing to load. With Christmas coming I'm expecting to have Japanese and Mandarin under my belt by boxing day)
Lock screenIt's the turn of Android to have the gimmick, and Apple to have a major security hole. Google have brought out facial recognition. Yup, you can now just look at your phone and it will unlock. A brilliant security update that is totally uncrackable unless, oh I don't know, you hold up a photo of the phone's owner. Office hi-jinx, here we come.
Apple has a similar security issue. It seems you can access Siri through the lock screen, meaning anyone can make phone calls or send email from your phone. Office Hi-jinx 2: This time it's War, here we come again. To top it off someone's worked out you can use smart covers to unlock a whole iPad2 device post iOS5 update. Office Hi-jinx 3: Close of Business.
NotificationsApple has borrowed heavily from Android here, with notifications now displayed discreetly at the top of the screen and in a pull down menu. Didn't see the pull down menu? Ah, that would be another one of Apple’s 'intuitive' controls then (just to be clear, I like a lot of what Apple do, but their smug attitude is not one of them and opens them up to these kinds of cheap pot shots. Which helps me as I can't afford the expensive pot shots).
I really like the new positioning of the messages but have yet to use the pull down menu. Maybe I don't get enough notifications to make it worthwhile...sniff... (excuse me while I have a manly cough). Anyway, it's a definite improvement.
Android's update here is much smaller, mainly because they got it pretty much right the first time. You can now clear notifications individually, which is going to come in handy just as soon as I start getting more notifications...sniff...
WidgetsHere's one of the areas where Apple and Android differ greatly. Apple only lets you place apps (or more accurately links to apps) on your device home screens. Android also lets you add widgets which show feeds of content from the widgets, like the latest tweets, Facebook posts, or calendar events. How does it manage this? Proper multitasking that lets apps run in the background, something Apple have been adamantly against, allowing only certain processes, such as gps, to keep running even when an app is 'paused'.
Google have improved their widgets even further with the new version of Android allowing you to resize them to show different quantities of content, something I'm going to find very handy on my tablet (yes I'm the one person in the world who bought a Xoom).
The CloudLet's end with the other big one. Once again we'll need a little history, and this time some geography as well (get those colouring pens ready). Android devices have had a suite of cloud tools since the beginning: namely Google docs, email, calendar, contacts and reader, syncing seamlessly with their desktop equivalents. For a while now they’ve also had support for music in the cloud, as long as you used the Amazon mp3 app and were in The States (go and watch
this. I’ll wait. Damn that man is talented). Google have their own cloud for music too, through it’s also US only and private beta. To make things more confusing, Amazon recently announced the Kindle Fire, a tablet based on Android, which looks to support a full media cloud, though whether this translates to the Amazon app on other devices remains to be seen. Basically, Android is awash in clouds, but they only handle certain types of media and only in certain countries (colour these in blue on your map).
Apple on the other hand announced the iCloud back in spring and immediately rolled it out for apps, allowing you to download the same app to different devices (or re-download to your own) without having to go through iTunes and syncing to a computer. Now with iOS5 they’re released the full cloud with iTunes Match (sync music you ripped). Only iTunes Match isn’t live yet. And the full cloud only works in the US. In the UK we just get the option to re-download music, which as underwhelming as it sounds, makes me very happy. I’ve got more than an iPhone’s worth of music, and having to re-sync with a computer to change it was extremely frustrating. It’s still frustrating if I want ripped music, but at least I can now get the stuff I bought from iTunes a lot more easily.
Want’s really going to confuse the public is when all these clouds are fully up and running and people start asking why they can’t move music from their Android HTC to their Apple iPad. It’s all fun and games until someone loses 64GB of data.
So, that’s it. Like I said, not a comprehensive review, but a few of the highlights. It’s clear Apple and Google are learning from and trying to one up each other, and health competition is good for everyone. There’s no clear cut winner here. Different operating systems are going to appeal to different people in the different ways, but at least now we have a decent choice. Let’s just not mention RIM….