Is Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 better than Apple iOS 5?

You accidentally the verb in your title. [fixed - Mr. H]


How about a data usage capper? Why don't we see that? "Oh, hey, I am currently notifying you that you have downloaded exactly 2GB of stuff this month. I automatically stopped you from downloading even one bit over that limit. You're welcome. You can turn me off in Settings."

That's what I want. Or, even better, NO data at all, but that's not the OS creator's problem.

Apparently with Android 4.x you can set both data usage alerts and hard limits, even customizing around your specific billing cycle. (and yes, turn off data altogether according to the article)

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-...our-data-plan/

That all looks very nice; very well done. One thing I wonder though, as someone pointed out in the comments to the article you linked, is how will carriers react to this? Assuming that they wouldn't like it that much because it makes it much easier for folks to avoid charges for exceeding their usage allowance, this raises the question: how much influence do carriers have over Apple's development of iOS? Are they privy to Apple's plans? Does Apple just do whatever Apple wants?

My guess is that Apple does share plans that will impact the carriers, who also influence Apple's iOS development. Apple puts in some pretty stiff purchasing requirements based on what Sprint had to agree to. I seriously doubt that the contract is a one way street with Cupertino calling all the shots.

I haven't owned either iOS or Android devices yet, but I'm pretty much determined to buy Android. For me the difference originates from the fundamental restrictions decided by Apple - only Apple-allowed apps, and no filesystem access.

The first is pretty obvious. I'm not going to be able to write my own software and use/distribute it freely on iOS. Nor will Apple allow some 3rd party apps which I would potentially like to use - a console or DOS emulator, etc.

A concrete example of the difference the latter makes is that on Android you can have an app sync any files you want automatically & transparently in the background, exactly as the phone was just another computer. No other app needs to know about the sync app to act on those files; nothing prevents you from switching to some other cloud service or non-cloud filesharing.

Gon makes some good points but unfortunately I don't think Apple really care about them - and neither does the average person..

I have the UK Galaxy Nexus and an iPhone 4S and before that had an android G1 - which to some extent I actually preferred to the GN because it had a hardware keyboard and there's sometimes a lag on the GN which slows the speed i can type - which already isn't as fast as on a hardware keyboard - i think it's something to do with background processes

ICS does look very nice and does have some great features missing from iOS but it's still not nearly as polished as iOS, not least the android file transfer manager which essentially makes you download and open an app built around a finder window managing a mounted file system in place of the finder, the terrible battery life/drain (i'd say i get almost twice the life on the iPhone, and I don't really use apps on either phone) and the speech recognition on android isn't good enough for me to bother using, but I actually dictate a lot of texts on the iPhone and Siri is pretty cool.

I have a honeycomb android tablet too and the constantly visible menu bar really bugs me. I thought the home button on the iPad annoyed me (accidental app closures) until I used the android tablet, especially as they tend to be 16:9 and you're loosing out on valuable screen real-estate. And there's a severe shortage of good android tablet apps. unless you really like the pron. Maybe the kindle will help on that front but with the customised android 2.0 software and the 7" screen I'm not sure..

I do think android will win out in the end, with better future hardware and a lot of work on the system, but it'll probably be like the whole 'mac/windows' thing - do you want something techy and customisable and/or cheap, or do you want something that 'just works' better than the competition? I do wonder what the market distribution will look like in 5 or 10 years time though... I hope we get more variety and I really want WebOS to take off open source.. I don't trust google with my personal information!

Widgets and other fads like Swype have a limited shelf life. I don't understand why people cannot simply peer into the near future and realize that the need to look at your screen to gain basic information or make basic commands is obviated by Siri.

Why would I want to pull my phone out and look at information widgets when I could just query through my voice and get my data usage, weather and a myriad of other data points?

Facial recognition sounds good but again I've got to pull the phone out and go through the motions.

Android seems to be late to the party. Much like when Apple was into the colored translucent iMacs. They got out and moved on as many companies didn't get the memo and looked horribly out of date. Android is adding mega screens & gloss and widgets and missing the boat on how we really are going to communicate in the future and that's by voice. They've caught up to all the areas that don't matter anymore.

Firstly, because the bandwidth of speech is so low it's silly. Looking at a list of headlines/senders of my incoming email for two seconds informs me whether I can safely ignore them for a few hours. Listening to that data would take half a minute. Just getting weather data for the rest of the week takes a long time when it's via speech, but it easily fits in a 1/5 screen widget so you can get it with one glance along with other information.

Secondly, when you don't see data points side to side, it's terribly hard to analyze them, see trends, pick out the items with significance etc. If I inspected my e-mail inbox via voice, not only will it be painfully slow, but the error rate will shoot up: there's a much higher chance I will not notice a pattern of things which individually aren't urgent, but together imply I'd better do something.

I'm never going to want to dictate text when I'm sitting on a bus, an airplane, in a meeting or at my desk so I don't really see why Swype or other improved virtual keyboards would have a limited desk life. Unless you are thinking of throat/bone microphones; I have no experience with those so I don't know how usable they are.