The iPhone's strongest rival?

Posted by nkbish0p at 19:02 0

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Although it may already be clear that I believe the iPhone 4 to be the best phone money can currently buy, it is always good to see strong competing devices as this forces Apple to improve their own product in order to compete. Also, I think it will be interesting for me to write about a different phone for a change.

There are a large quantity of operating systems on the market, but personally I think Google's Android platform is the closest competitor to iOS and one Android phone in particular has caught my eye

The Google Nexus S - The best android phone ever?

There are several reasons that I think this phone is great, but unfortunately the price is not one of them. Retailing at £539 at the time of writing on Expansys makes this phone one of few phones on the market to be more expensive than a base 16gb iPhone 4. Bad start admittedly.

This phone goes with one of the major features of most current flagship Android handsets, a large superAMOLED display. These screens are great and tend to look more impressive than the display found on an iPhone 4. Unfortunately the resolution cannot match the iPhone 4 but it is not bad at 960*640 pixels.

An important thing to consider when buying an Android handset is that because there are so many different phones available, some may get updates faster than others. Fortunately the Nexus S ships with Android 2.3 installed and as Google's flagship device, I would expect it to receive updates before almost all the other Android phones. A great positive.

The camera is on a par with the competition with a 5 megapixel sensor, standard fare in modern smartphones and can also record 720p high definition video, which is also pretty standard. It is good to see the back of the days when awful cameras were fitted to smartphones such as the original and 3g iPhones.

The phone has 16gb of built in storage (a nice and slightly unusual feature for an Android phone) and 512mb of RAM which should help with multitasking. The battery is also huge at 1500mah.

It is great to see Google putting their name on a phone in a similar way to how Apple creates the software and hardware for its devices. The fact is, as Google's top handset this phone should enjoy excellent support until a new "Googlephone" is released at least. The huge number of handsets available with Android makes it hard for any phone to stand out inside the Android ecosystem and I think Google may be onto a winning formula by providing their own product with no ties to a handset manufacturer (however it should be noted that this particular phone is based on the Samsung Galaxy S).

In short, if you are looking for a new smartphone, but for some reason do't wish to buy an iPhone, or are looking for a phone with a large screen I would suggest giving the Nexus S a try, especially if you are particularly interested in an Android handset.

If you believe I have missed something out, or wish to share your experiences with this phone, please leave a comment below!

Some Statistics

Posted by nkbish0p at 18:15 5

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As the choice of mobile operating systems has expanded over the past four or so years, the rivalries between the OS manufacturers have grown stronger and this has filtered down to the users of each system, with many users liking to claim that their OS whether it be iOS, Android, Windows or even Symbian is the "best". Of course, the best operating system is objective, depending what you aim to use it for and how well each fits your need, so the point of this article is not to get my viewpoint on this across (though I am planning to write an article on this in the near future) but to answer another important question. Which operating system is the most commonly used?

This topic has been hotly debated, as different statistics can seem to show a different outcome, but for this article I will be focusing on UK USERS ONLY as this is the primary audience for this blog. I will be comparing the percentage of the market that each provider has and also the growth.

It can be seen on the graph that iOS is currently the most popular OS in the United Kingdom, with a market share of over 40%, just ahead of RIM's blackberry which has a share of around 38%. It should however be noted that the market share of iOS is falling steadily, which could be down to the growing popularity of Google's android, which now has around 13% of the market.

From the graph I would predict that the likely dominant mobile OS's for the near future will be iOS and Android. Personally I find it staggering how popular Blackberry actually is, considering the advantages of both Android and iOS over this platform. (For example, iOS has over 400,000 apps, Android over 250,000 whilst Blackberry users have less than 17,000 to choose from).

it must also be noted that in the next few months, Microsoft's windows phone 7 platform will likely make an appearance on the graph as a stand alone OS. In my opinion it is likely that business users will switch from Blackberry to Windows Phone 7 as the blackberry platform seems outdated and suffering from a lack of innovation. (I am currently in the process of writing an article about Windows Phone 7, check back soon for that!)

In conclusion, if you are looking to buy a new phone and have an interest in using your phone to download apps as well as to stay inline with the competition in terms of updates and progression I would strongly advise against buying anything other than an Android or iOS handset, at least until Windows Phone 7 has matured slightly and it becomes obvious where this platform stands. It should be noted that the more users a platform has, the more apps and software will be developed for it; for an example compare Windows and Mac OSX, as windows has far more users, far more developers have developed far more programs and software for it. Although iOS had a huge head start (it was released before Android) giving it it's huge market share it will be interesting to see over the coming months whether Android becomes the primary platform for developers to work with (this will be strongly influenced by worldwide usage, as android has a much stronger user base worldwide than in the UK). I think it is a foregone conclusion that before long, more applications will be available for Android than iOS. What will happen to Blackberry however remains to be seen...

Let me know what you think about your phone and/or operating system in the comments below!