EPTOver the past few years I have owned different kinds of smartphones. I started out with a Sony Ericsson W950i, then briefly switched to one of these Nokia music smartphones but ended up buying an iPhone 3GS a few months later. Two years later I replaced the iPhone with an HTC 8S (running WP8) and two weeks ago I purchased a Samsung Galaxy S4. I have also been the owner of a couple of tablets: I started out with a piece of junk of Creative, then bought a Galaxy Tab 7", Asus Transformer Tab and now I own an iPad mini. In terms of operating systems, I pretty much used every popular one on the market, from Android 2.1 to 4.2, iOS 3 all the way up to iOS 7, and Windows Phone 8.
It's these operating systems I want to dedicate this blog to, because the landscape has significantly over the past few years. Back in the day when I had Android on my tablet and iOS on my iPhone, the former felt like a slower, inferior version of the latter. The potential was there, but Android 2 wasn't nearly as fun and fluent to use as iOS 4 was. Android's only two advantages - multitasking and widgets - were offset by the fact that the apps weren't nearly as good and the operating system itself incredibly power-inefficient.
Let's fast-forward to 2012. iOS is now running version 6 and Android is running version 4. A new player has also entered the arena in the form of Windows Phone 8, a promising operating system that seeks to offers its users the simplicity of iOS with the customisability of Android. What happened in those two years is basically that Apple refrained from changing iOS too much or at all (after all, why change a winning team?), adding small changes here and there, and google set out to optimise Android. The odd result was that iOS became more cumbersome and Android a lot more lean. The decision to ditch my iPhone 3GS in favour of HTC's 8S was because the iPhone clearly struggled running iOS 6 smoothly: animations weren't fluent, it took a long time to start up apps etc. The switch to Windows Phone 8 was relatively easy because Microsoft took some cues from Apple and decided to optimise WP8 for a limited set of hardware configurations, assuring that it would run smoothly regardless of how powerful your phone was. I can be brief about my WP8 experience: in terms of user-friendliness it is by far the best platform out there, and the lack of apps wasn't really much of a hindrance. There was one bug that pretty much killed the experience, and that was that WP8 had the tendency to eat away at your available memory; after six months of use, I ended up having barely 8mb of available memory because system slowly filled the "others" folder. That folder is used for temporary files but users can't access it, and are thus unable to clean it. The only way to emply that folder is to do a full factory reset, which requires you to reinstall all the apps you downloaded, resync everything with the services you use etc.
In 2012 I also bought an Asus Transformer Tab TF300. I hoped that I could use it to make notes in college, but that experiment failed hard. I did have a fun time exploring android and its customisability though. The fact that I could set up widgets to keep track of my emails, calendar etc was particularly useful: back in iOS I had to open an app every time I wanted to see what I had planned for next week, or which emails were still unread. The downside to Android on a tablet was (and maybe still is, I'm not sure) that there are very few tablet-specific applications, which means that the vast majority of apps are just oversized phone apps. Needless to say, this doesn't always end well: what looks good on a 4-5" display doesn't necessarily look good on a 10" display. I ended up trading the Transformer Tab for an iPad mini, which is by far the best tablet I have ever used (and I use it a lot).
On to 2013: I traded my HTC 8S for a Galaxy S4 and my Transformer Tab for an iPad. After extensive experience with various mobile operating systems, I had finally settled on what for me seemed the best situation in the current market: Android's customisability for a 5" phone and iOS' simplicity and tablet-tailored apps for an 8" tablet.
Now, to come back to the starting premise of this post: iOS 7. I admit I got kind of excited when Apple revealed that they were going to do a large overhaul of their mobile operating system. I have used Android for quite some time now and I really like some of Google's design choices, especially with regard to multitasking and the use of home screens. I was really hoping that Apple had taken a cue from their competitors and would finally make some real changes to their platform. The opposite happened: apart from a visual overhaul (which make my iPad mini look more like a toy than a serious appliance - then again, so does the iPhone 5C) and a control centre (finally!) not much has changed. The new animations are nice but weren't really necessary, the device can learn from your habbits (at the expense of battery life) and there are dynamic backgrounds. My iPad runs a tad slower too. I had expected a lot more from this, to be honest. In my opinion, android is increasingly getting ahead in terms of functionality. It may not be as straightforward and user friendly as WP8 or iOS, but after your home screens are set up, it's as easy to use as the aforementioned systems. I actually gave my old Galaxy S2 to a friend and while initially she was a bit baffled by the possibilities, she quickly grasped how everything worked and had a great time finding apps and customising her home screens.
Personally, I feel like Apple is running out of ideas. The colourful new iPhone 5C line and iOS 7 really make me think that Apple is trying to go a different direction: that of teenagers with a disposable income who wish to show off their colourful and expensive devices to their friends. It probably doesn't count much as a statistic, but I'm increasingly seeing WP8 and higher-end android phones popping up around me. Could it be that apple feels that it is slowly losing an uncomfortable amount of marketshare and that it wants to turn things around?
