Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Day +1539 : iPhone or Android Phone?

I am fine today.

After much disappointment with Windows Mobile as mentioned on Day +1525 : Windows Mobile 6 is a bad choice!, I am paying more attention to the development of mobile phone in the market, and the understanding so far is that the choice is between iPhone and Android Phone.

iPhone is from Apple and it consists of the hardware and operating system called iOS. Android is an open source mobile phone operating system based on Linux developed by Google. The main difference between the two is that Android runs on many types of phone and iOS run on iPhone only. So in term of hardware, Android users have more choices.

All softwares that we would like to install on both iPhone and Apple has to come from their respective stores, with or without charge; App Store for the case of iPhone and Android Market for the Android. That means, we can't install applications which are not from the stores (third party apps) and also cannot simply share applications, thus reducing piracy.

However, hackers came out ways to bypass the limitation; Jailbreaking for iOS and rooting for Android. And it is very interesting to learn that the US Library of Congress declared on 26th July 2010 that Jailbreaking is legal. So if you wanted to run a third party application or would like to run an application developed yourself but don't want the trouble to get approval, then Jailbreaking is the solution :-) Apple will not service a Jailbroken phone as the act void its warranty but a restore will fix that.

If you are a developer and would like to develop applications for iOS, then you need to get a Apple Mac computer as the development tools can run on Mac OS only. However, Android applications can be developed on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I also understand that developing Android application is a lot more difficult and slower than developing applications for iOS.

I am not in hurry to get a new phone but if you ask me to choose now, the choice is iPhone :-) Why? Don't know, based on feeling.

See you next post :-)

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