iPHONE VS ANDROID - WHICH PHONE IS BEST FOR POWER USERS?

The newest iPhone comes out in two weeks; the Android OS continues to deploy on better and better hardware; and both operating systems roll out exciting new features and innovations with each release. So which deserves your hard-earned cash?

A Starting Point

You can evaluate iPhone and Android devices from countless angles,^[1] so rather than pretend that we've got the One True Comparison, it only seems appropriate to highlight that we're not necessarily your average user. For more specifics on how we judge these devices, read this footnote.

For our purposes, we're measuring each phone OS against 20 features we care about most, declaring a winner (or a tie) for each category, and adding it all up. The extent to which our measurements match up with what you most care about may vary, but we suspect that many of you share similar values when it comes to your smartphone.

Note: The table below indicates the device we think "wins" each category. A happy Android means we think Android is better in that category; an Apple means iPhone outperforms Android; categories with both an Android and Apple are ties.

Below, we've broken down the categories above and explained whey we chose the winners as we did.

Ease of Use; Winner: iPhone 

Android has come a long way in a short time, but from an ease-of-use perspective, the iPhone wins out. You can pick up any iPhone and quickly, easily understand what's going on. It's got one main button on the front of the device, and everything you do consists of tapping app icons from the home screen. Android devices have several buttons on the front of the device that perform a variety of functions, and once you unlock the screen (and depending on which Android device you have), you're confronted with many different possible home screens and ways of doing things from those home screens.

Openness; Winner: Android 

We really like that the Android operating system is open source, but what's more important to most end users is openness in terms of what you can run on these devices. The operating systems themselves are clearly important, but one thing's abundantly clear: the applications make the phone. And while Google has yet to get in hot water for rejecting apps based on anti-competitive fear or censorship, Apple has. A lot.

Battery Life; Winner: iPhone 

Apple has taken battery life extremely seriously in their careful development of the iPhone, and it's shown. While Android devices get a kitchen-sink's worth of features that you may consider to be a fair tradeoff for battery life, there's little question that the iPhone's battery life outlasts that of most Android devices. Battery performance definitely varies from Android handset to Android handset (the recently released EVO is taking big hits for its poor battery performance), but the iPhone's battery performance—particularly the new iPhone's performance—generally outlasts Android's.

Multitasking; Tie  

It's a big deal that the iPhone is finally getting some multitasking support in iOS4, and while it's still not as true of multitasking as Android users enjoy, the tradeoff in terms off battery life improvements is important enough that, overall, we'd consider multitasking to be a wash.

Software Keyboard; Winner: iPhone 

If you talk to anyone who's used both the iPhone and Android with some frequency, the general consensus is that the iPhone's software keyboard is a good deal better than Android's default keyboard. That's unfortunate for Android users, but the consolation is that you can install any custom keyboard as your default keyboard on Android, and we've seen some solid keyboard alternatives. Still, the advantage, if only by virtue of being better out of the box, goes to the iPhone.

System-Wide Search; Tie  

Apple's implementation of Spotlight on the iPhone searches contacts, media, email, applications, notes, and calendar. Android searches most of that (but notably not email), but also integrates with auto-suggest web searches; it also lets other applications plug into it, so the more supported apps you install, the more robust the universal search becomes.

Notification system; Winner: Android 

This may seem like a silly thing to care too much about, but the iPhone's modal notification system is particularly user un-friendly, especially for a device as friendly as the iPhone. You have to act on a notification, and you can only see one notification at a time before the next one dismisses the previous one entirely. Android's brilliant pull-down window shade notification tray, on the other hand, is a beautiful thing that could make any iPhone owner jealous.

Voice-to-Text; Winner: Android 

Nearly every text field on an Android device can be filled with a few words from your mouth, and it works surprisingly well. You can respond to emails by voice, send long text messages by voice while you're walking around Target, respond to your editor's IMs while you're at a graduation ceremony, and so on, as long as you're comfortable talking to your phone (it is a phone, so you should be). Apart from voice-to-text in third party apps, iOS doesn't support voice-to-text at all.

Syncing; Winner: Android 

iPhones can be incredible standalone devices, but they're surprisingly old-fashioned when it comes to syncing, requiring users to plug into their computers and connect to iTunes to do all sorts of syncing and activating that could be more conveniently done wirelessly. Android phones support pretty great over-the-air syncing with your Google account, so much so that if you were to lose your previous Android phone, simply entering your Google account into a new one can get you up and running with a usable phone in a jiffy.

Non-Google Sync; Winner: iPhone 

Android's great at syncing seamlessly with Google's servers, but it's not so keen on syncing with other popular sources of data—like, say, Outlook, Address Book, or iTunes. If you're a heavy user of any of those applications, the iPhone is the easiest option.

Tethering; Winner: Android 

The cost of tethering on Android devices varies depending on the provider, but so far the Android tethering situation is better off than what AT&T is offering on the iPhone. In the States, AT&T will charge you $20/month just for the privilege of tethering your iPhone's data connection to a computer—despite the fact that you're already paying for a metered data plan. The situation isn't necessarily much better across the Android-sphere (Sprint is also planning to charge for tethering on the EVO, for example), but currently most Android carriers are sticking with "unlimited" plans, versus AT&T/iPhone's 2GB limit. It's still a close race on this point, but Android edges ahead with the ability to turn your handset into a Wi-Fi hotspot that can deliver wireless to you and seven of your closest friends.

Release and Update Consistency; Winner: iPhone 

These days, your mobile OS is just as important (if not more) than mobile hardware, and Apple has set the consumer expectation to expect that their device will receive new feature updates even if it isn't the latest phone. To that end, it's extremely easy to keep track of what's going on in the iPhone ecosystem. Apple releases one new phone a year, and one major update each year. When an update rolls out, every phone receives the update at the same time (unless it's particularly old; the original iPhone won't upgrade to iOS4, for example). In contrast, Android runs on a lot of different devices, and when Google pushes out a new update, there's no telling when or if it's going to make its way to your phone. In the future Google is planning to change to yearly Android updates similar to iPhone OS updates, which will likely help this situation, but in the meantime, it's a source of frustration for Android users.

Apps; Tie  

A lot of people may disagree on this assessment, given that Apple's App Store has around four times the number of applications the Android Market does, but there's also a lot of crap in the App Store, and at this point, most popular, mission-critical applications have been developed for both the iPhone and Android. What's more, some potentially very popular applications end up locked out of the App Store for, if we're being generous, arbitrary reasons. At the end of the day, it may be a big deal that your must-have application X is missing from the Android Market/App Store, and those may end up to be dealbreakers for you, but overall we'd call them pretty even.

Web browsing; Tie  

The iPhone's Mobile Safari browser, while not without its faults, is a very nice, very usable mobile browser. Android's browser, while not as smooth an operator as Safari, supports (orcan support) Flash. The extent to which that matters to you may vary, but it's big enough that we're considering it a tie.

Gaming; Winner: iPhone 

We're frugal productivity nerds at Lifehacker, so we don't really care all that much about gaming. And while the number of solid gaming options available in the Android Market continue to grow, it's still not on par with what's available for the iPhone.

Music Player; Winner: iPhone 

Android may do a lot of things well, but one arena where its users regularly voice complaint is with its default media player. Where the iPhone comes with a very solid iPod app, most Android users quickly go looking for alternative players. Google is hyping over-the-internet streaming of all your music from your desktop computer eventually, but until we see something great there, the iPhone still wins out.

Free Turn-by-Turn Navigation; Winner: Android 

After the Google Voice debacle from last year, it's looking less and less likely that Google will ever develop another new app for the iPhone. Unfortunately, that means that extremely cool applications like Google Maps Navigation, Google's free turn-by-turn GPS application, will never make it to the iPhone, and so far there isn't anything as good for the iPhone that's also free. The iPhone does have its share of solid for-a-price GPS utilities in the App Store (and some decent inexpensive-to-free options), but Maps Navigation is built into Android and outshines the iPhone's free alternatives.

Integration with Google Apps; Winner: Android 

If you rely on Google tools like Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and the like, Android just does it better. The iPhone's still no slouch, and can sync over-the-air with Contacts, Calendar, and even does Gmail push for instant new message notifications, but if you're a serious Google or even just Gmail user, the iPhone doesn't stack up to Android.

Google Voice; Winner: Android 

It may seem absurd to make this a separate point of comparison from Google Apps, but Voice is a very phone-centric app with potentially huge influence over how you use your phone. Apple had the option to approve a Google Voice app for the iPhone and completely blew it. And since we really love Google Voice, it only makes Android look that much more attractive.

Customizable; Winner: Android 

You may be able to add a wallpaper to your iPhone desktop when iOS4 rolls out, but beyond that, there's not much you can do to tweak your iPhone to exactly how you like it—without jailbreaking, that is. In comparison, Android devices are Mr. Potato Heads of customizability.

Overall Score: Android: 13; iPhone: 11 

Clearly our scorecard is extremely subjective, so take this evaluation with a grain of salt, and consider how important the features we listed (and maybe those we didn't list) are to you and come up with your own assessment. If your priorities are similar to ours, you're likely looking at an Android for your next purchase. Frankly, it feels a little like a draw overall. (My ideal would be Android running on the iPhone 4, which is actually possible, eventually.)

In fact, in our recent poll on the subject, 66 percent of Lifehacker readers said they prefer Android; 30 percent prefer the iPhone, and 4 percent preferred neither. Whichever end of the spectrum you fall on, we'd love to hear more about what's driving your decision in the comments.

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Why just Android and iPhone? 


The iPhone and Android operating systems are not the only mobile OSes on the block, but they're what we're focusing on in this post. It's cool if you're really into Windows Mobile/Phone 7 or webOS. For the purpose of this post, we're focusing on what we consider to be the most popular options among our readers. iPhone?  
 

How we judge: 

We consider ourselves power users who care about things like openness, user control, and customizability; we also care about ease of use, high quality design, and quality hardware. For better or worse (usually worse), these qualities often end up at odds with one another in the current smartphone market, but they make up the measuring stick against which we're evaluating these devices.

It's also probably worth noting that, Android OS and hardware aside, we're big fans of several of Google's services, and so some of those play an important role in some of the categories above. It may not seem fair to Apple and the iPhone to do so, but in most instances (like Google Voice), Apple had the opportunity to accept Google-focused applications to the App Store.

Finally, the state of Android devices can be somewhat confusing because they're released by different carriers and on lots of different hardware. We tried to strike a balance between acknowledging faults on some of the worst incarnations of Android hardware while also keeping in mind the best. To the extent that older iPhones aren't up to snuff compared to the new iPhone, we've done the same thing in discussing the iPhone.

Inside Job - Movie Review


It was literally the greatest heist of all times, the type that erstwhile conquerors of the world would wonder how someone could do it without killing millions in the process. And it is a heist that has largely gone unpunished.

On Sep 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, beginning the collapse of the financial system globally. Many more companies underwent the same fate causing literally millions to lose their life savings and millions more, their jobs. The answer to the question as to who caused it, and how, has largely remained fragmentary... Until now.

"Inside Job" gives the much-needed and extensive full picture.

"Inside Job" is eerie, and surreal in its reality. Narrated by Matt Damon, it seems like the story of the wild wild west, and how a few greedy cowboys managed to do what was once the purview of marauding conquerors - loot, plunder and ravage through the financial world triggering a kind of collapse the world has not seen since the depression of the 1930s.

That great depression was largely limited to the US. In a globalised world, this one threatened to collapse the entire law and order and democracy of the world, had it not been stemmed.

The film weaves together the story of the collapse by interviewing the key people who warned against this impending doom beforehand and thus suffered for it from a world keen on growth and development, but not the truth. Obviously, the ones most responsible refused to be interviewed. But the recordings at a congressional hearing throw some startling light about the quality of people on whom the fate of the financial system rests.

The film beautifully refuses to be just confined to numbers, as it throws in a psychiatrist and a prostitute, both of whom have 'serviced' the wall-street gangs and thus gives a mental evaluation of the men who handle our money, and also what they do with it.

Yet the film does get a little complex in its financial jargon, but this is limited.

From the Indian perspective, this is perhaps the most important American film in decades because the Indian economy, since liberalization in the early 1990s, has begun following the American model, often blindly. India's new generation of businessmen pride themselves as being like their American counterparts.

And just like in the US, the Indian business and financial world is also pressing for lesser regulations in the name of growth. The film clearly shows the ill-effects of such blind deregulation.

The distorted nature of our society also becomes evident from the fact that the country that houses the maximum number of people in its prisons have not found the need to incarcerate those who caused this financial meltdown. They are not only left free, but are in a position of power where they can do greater and wider damage. Sounds familiar?

It's like Thomas Jefferson who after drafting the American constitution was asked by an old woman about the kind of government they have given her. Jefferson said: "A republic, if you can keep it."

The financial world is the backbone of a republic. Hence the lesson from this depression, and the film, is clear - the financial world needs its checks and balances

Gnomeo & Juliet - Movie Review

It is one of the most famous stories of all times, having been told in different forms and shapes through different times and cultures but with the same message of love over war.

The William Shakespeare version of star-crossed lovers destined for doom gets a modern, animated, 3D avatar and despite a well-known story, some cliches and a happy ending unlike the original, does manage to hold the fun quotient.

The Reds and Blues are two groups of gnomes living in neighbouring houses. For their owners, they are merely decorative pieces, but away from their eyes, they not only come to life, but are at war with each other. Much to their own chagrin Gnomeo, a blue and Juliet, a red, fall in love and aided by a plastic crane, secretly court each other. But can their love survive the hatred of their clans?

The two best things about this film are its immaculate animation and wit. To give garden gnomes the detailed expression would definitely have taken a lot of hard work. The wit and play on garden and gnomes is obvious from the name of the film but also delight in other places. Consider these: 'weapon of grass destruction' and 'terrafirminator'.

The script of the film went through multiple hands, nine to be exact. And the result shows. Yet, there is something that seems to be missing in the film that could have lifted it from being just good to absolute greatness.

In terms of metaphor though, it's spot on. Would you let the hatred of others destroy your love? The little warring gnome world becomes an analogy for the world, where people find different ways and means to fight and destroy each other. Amidst this, the hope can be a simple love between two people. Unlike Shakespeare's original, this fragile love does win in the end and unite the clans.

The film will obviously delight kids, and with a little stretch of their imagination, adults are likely to enjoy it equally. The pun on cultural kitch and Elton John's music, lends additional charm to this 'gnonderful' film. 

I'm Number Four - Movie Review


After the tremendous cinematic success of "Twilight", there was an opening for something similar in the science fiction space. Hence when a book was being written that brought the broody, angst-ridden teen who has to perennially keep running to the realm of science, the rights for the film were bought even before the book was out.

The result is "I Am Number Four" - a "Superman" meets "Twilight" meets "Jumper" meets "X Men" meets "Transformers" meets "Spiderman" kind of film - that strangely works.

Number 4, played by Alex Pettyfer, is one of the nine living infants from the planet Lorien with special powers that are hunted by the Mogadorians, an evil specie that invade and absorb the resources of new worlds. He lives in hiding with his protector Henri (Timothy Olyphant) and keeps moving from one place to another to avoid detection, till in one place he falls in love with Sarah (Dianna Agron) and wants to stay and fight back practicing, and growing confident of, his telekinetic powers.

The film produced by Michael Bay and directed by D.J. Caruso has stamps of the Steven Speilberg school of filmmaking, where in the beginning everything is underplayed, and the mystery and the powers of the protagonist slowly unfold to a grand, violent finale full of special effects that blows the audience.

There is really nothing original in the film as it merely rearranges known situations and resolutions. Yet, linear, simple and cliched as it may be, it is done without being too in the face. Hence, there's a comfort of the familiar in the film for mass audiences. The discerning audiences can give it a convenient miss.

Though attempt has been made to make Number 4 silent and broody like Robert Pattinson from "Twilight", he is too hulky to be so. Also, in the rush to drive the chase story, there's little time to develop the love angle, something that we will obviously see in the next instalments.

For Indians, this is a special film as it is the first fully produced film by Reliance Big Entertainment in association with Spielberg's studio and thus marks Reliance's true global debut.

"I Am Number Four" represents the hurried rush for formulae that will work at the global stage, obvious from the fact that the rights to the book were brought by Dreamworks a year before the book was released and both the book and the film come barely six months of each other.

The result is the beginning of a new film franchisee. However, to retain audiences' attention, the filmmakers will have to do much better in every department of the film.