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We, of course, know about the success of the Apple iPhone smartphone in the market. The success, that has led to a change in attitude towards the use of mobile devices. However, we note that it would be incorrect to talk about the usability of the devices without comparing it with competitors. The real, in our opinion, competitor of iPhone is HTC Hero.
Key Features, which were brought to the market by smartphones from Apple in 2007 was the convenient finger orientation and gesture control of the phone’s menu. The operating system included major elements of the interface – the icons, signatures, and so on, which dramatically simplified the work with your smartphone.
In addition, the vendor increased the speed of the menu in general, that makes the iPhone a more attractive device, compared with Windows Mobile and Symbian OS-devices which seem to be out of competition at this point. Another innovation of Apple is a truly successful attempt to implement catalog content on a smartphone. Previously, such solutions had already existed on other platforms, but did not have proper success. Finally, another key aspect of the novelty of the system that Apple smartphones run is the close and native integration with multimedia and Web content. Users can enjoy Internet services as a client software, and directly to the mobile version of Safari, the browser that has become the best usability among mobile platforms.
But a natural question arises: Does the iPhone have no real competitors? Are there no more qualitatively performed operating systems that support multitouch and finger control and are adapted to work with web? We take the liberty to say that there ia a real competitor called Android OS that is installed on HTC Hero.
Let’s consider the basic aspects of the implementation of both systems. We will talk about iPhone OS 3.1 installed on iPhone and Android OS 1.6 installed on Hero (we certainly know about the upcoming release of Android OS 2.0).
Interface
Organization of the user interface the Apple iPhone was unique in the market for quite a long time. At the standby screen user can display multiple quick launch application icons, while in the menu they are organized in the form of screens with the matrix of 4 * 4 icons : at the bottom default access to the dialer icon, message editor, Safari browser and media player is constantly displayed. Switching between screens is carried out almost instantly, and quickly processed in sign team. Items and the elements themselves are made in large settings menu. iPhone OS supports kinetic scrolling lists and quick change screen orientation from the accelerometer. In the third version of the iPhone OS it has become possible to run multiple applications, which is absent in the two previous releases.
The screen mode of HTC Hero is made based on icons and widgets, which can not only manage specific settings (eg, enable / disable the phone module), but also display information directly on the display – for example, e-mails or update news from social networks that the user prefers. The number of screens may be different. It depends entirely on the revised user’s shell (in our case it is HTC Sense with 7 screens). The menu of the Hero is traditional for ordinary phones, made in the form of a screen with rows of 4 icons. Here, as in the iPhone OS, kinetic scrolling is realized. Android OS supports multitasking, but, in our opinion, in this version it is implemented unsuccessfully – running applications are not removed by normal means, consuming memory and, of course, longer battery life, working in the background.
Social Networks. Communications.
Both devices are adapted to varying tasks and valuable work on the Internet on a desktop level. Safari and the built-in Android OS browser are built on one of the best engine on the market- WebKit. It can handle HTML-pages with “heavy” layout. The iPhone is easy to navigate with the ability to quickly zoom pages and correctly display AJAX-elements. The Android OS has support for Adobe Flash, which Apple refused.
Currently there are a huge number of customers Internet services, such as Twitter or blogging for iPhone and HTC Hero.
Another major difference between the iPhone OS and Android OS is the weaker correlation with the services Apple, for example, to synchronize data. MobileMe package, in general, solves these problems, but is distributed by subscription. In the case of the Android OS, we see a total integration of services from Google – from GMail and Google Talk to the most recent example, Google Voice.
Multimedia and Games
Obviously, the iPhone was supposed to be the most convenient device for playing audio-video content. In fact, it is a system for playing music and video.
HTC Hero with Android OS, built on Linux is of course different. Naturally, the user, who expects from the system comparable to the iPhone a high level of implementation of multimedia, will be a little bit disappointed. In particular, the system does not support record in MP3-format, will not play AVI-video and so on.
In terms of game support the latest version of iPhone OS, supporting new versions of OpenGL libraries, can be called a very high-quality gaming platform. It has a lot of games with a fascinating and worthy of specialized consoles gameplay, for example, in sports simulations. The Android OS has some restrictions on the memory size the game occupies, which is 256 MB.
Conclusion
Thus, both devices generally completely cover up all the needs of the modern user in the field of communications. In terms of software, it seems, that the preferable is the iPhone due to its feature of being suitable for multimedia tasks, leaving the HTC Hero with Android OS on the second place. However, a version of “mobile” Linux has a competitive advantage to developers and vendors of devices because of the openness of the OS. At the same time, if you are neither one nor the other, Android OS could be just another interesting and rather nice system for the smartphone.
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