The Great Mobile OS Smackdown
August 8th, 2010, 3:04pm by JakeBecause sometimes, 140 characters just isn’t enough. Chime in on the 3 modern smart phone operating systems on the market. What works well, what works poorly, how far has each advanced in the past 2 years. Are iPhone apps better because the platform is more popular, or because the platform is more powerful? As I was about to tweet to Kelvin, “@sbono13 Exactly. Doesn’t relate to iOS improvement, but to popularity. Like saying Windows was better than OS X b/c it had more apps.” If there were a total clean slate, which OS would you choose to build upon?
August 8th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Before getting to apps, our discussion was centered on the pace of webOS development. Frankly, I couldn’t be more disappointed. Remember, back when Palm’s inventory problems became apparent, my pie-in-the-sky dream was that Palm had a webOS roadmap that had been shown to VZ and AT&T that would make the inventory appealing. Palm has responded by not doing anything at all in 6 months. WebOS was good to begin with, and when Palm was releasing an update every month, it was easy to believe that since it was undergoing active improvement, any of its deficiencies would be addressed. Taking a step back though, it’s hard to be impressed with what’s been changed between 1.0 and 1.4.1 (a period spanning 15 months). Not much added functionality besides video recording and limited PDK support. In the meantime, iOS has gone from 2.0 to 3.0 to 4.0, and now pretty much match webOS feature-by-feature (copy/paste, multiple exchange accounts, universal search, universal inbox, “multitasking,” video recording, geolocastion, etc). Android has improved the most between cupcake and froyo, adding widgets, video recording, free navigation, synergy-like facebook/flickr/twitter contacts integration, voice-to-text, 5X performance boost, SD card support for 3rd party apps.
August 8th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
As for apps, I suspect the iPhone’s appeal to developers is because of both the subscriber base and the mature tools available. WebOS devs can’t access the camera or microphone, dataviz is on record saying they couldn’t do docs2go without hybrid sdk/pdk support, apps can only save images with a screen-cap, image processing can’t happen on device, etc. Palm has a long way to go, and they wasted a lot of time trying to convince people that web tools were good enough.
August 8th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Oh, and I forgot to include Flash in the list of features that Froyo has added! Where in the world is Palm’s implementation?
August 8th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
In the “something’s rotten in the state of Denmark” department, AT&T has decided not to roll out 1.4.5 for the Pixi+. Weird, right? Is AT&T expecting 2.0 sooner rather than later? Then why bother with 1.4.5 for the Pre+? So if it’s performance related, is it safe to assume that Pixi will not be able to support future updates either, if they roll up previous updates? Or maybe Palm finds a way to increase performance such that Pixi can run PDK apps alright.
August 10th, 2010 at 12:32 am
I can’t follow that. π
I will say that as a Palm fanboy, I was pleased with the progress from January 2009-February 2010, especially June-February. In that 8 months, Palm launched the Pre, announced & launched the Pixi, refreshed each product. Improved the SDK, launched the PDK. Let the App Catalog run free. Made deals with a dozen carriers in a half dozen countries.
The next 6 months? The sold the company to HP and sold a few phones to AT&T. If the next 6 months are anything like these last 6, then I don’t even see the point.
August 10th, 2010 at 1:47 am
If the next 6 months are anything like the first 8, I still don’t think it’s good enough. I bet Palm’s sales and it’s position in the marketplace are currently worse than they have ever been. Minor updates isn’t going to change anything. They need a Pre-esque monumental announcement to regain any “heartshare” (new word I read a few weeks ago). The saving grace is that now Palm has a sugar daddy who is probably going to let them coast for a few years while they track down the *real* sexual harrassment perpetrator… π