First there was iPhone from Apple. Soon, the world fell in love with iPhone, so much so that every other phone in the fray just made up the crowd, while iPhone ruled the roost. Of course, there were fringe players like those operating on Blackberry OS, Symbian OS and the like. Then came Android, the mobile OS developed by Google. And major mobile manufacturers looked at Android as a potent weapon to take on the might of Apple. In contrast to iOS that was a closed source software, Android provided an open platform to all major players like HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, etc, and the world saw a wave of new exciting smartphones that were packed with features that were not inferior to iPhones at any cost. In fact, in some features, specs of Android phones were even better than iPhones. Now, after the success of android OS has been proved beyond doubt, and the experimental stage is over, it is time to make a quick comparison between iPhone and Android phones to find out their differences.
From the outset, let me make it clear that I have no intentions of denouncing one at the cost of another. Both operating systems are nothing short of marvelous and phones from both breeds are stunning devices, gliding on iOS and Android OS respectively. If one reads reviews of Apple phones, it feels as if they are just, and if one reads the reviews of latest Android phone, they make one feel as if nothing could be better than these phones. The truth lies somewhere in between. Both OS are exceptional, but both have their glitches, and both have their shortcomings that are disappointing for the users.
Before I talk about user experience and performance, it is prudent to let readers know that iPhones are available in US on AT&T and Verizon platforms, while Android phones are not tied to a single service provider.
One cannot replace the battery of an iPhone himself, whereas it is easy to remove and replace the battery in any Android based smartphone.
While it is only natural for Apple to be ahead of Google in terms of apps, the number of apps from Android app store is increasing by the day and today there are more than a hundred thousand apps in Google’s Android app store to take on 200000 apps in Apple’s app store coupled with iTunes.
iPhones come in different versions with fixed internal storage and the user cannot hope to expand memory with micro SD cards, which is a common thing with all Android phones.
iPhones do not have physical keyboard, whereas there are some Android phones with physical QWERTY keyboards
There used to be a time when the screen resolution of iPhones was the highest and no other phone could match the brightness of iPhone’s display, but today there are many Android phones with higher resolutions
iPhones have only Safari browser, whereas Android phones boast many like Dolphin, Opera or even Firefox mini. Safari does not support flash well and this is the grouse of many iPhone users. On the other hand, Android phones face no such problem while browsing as they have full flash support.
Integration with Google Maps and many other Google apps is better and more efficient in Android phones than iPhones. This is only to be expected as Android is a mobile OS developed by Google itself.