new iPhone 4s

[Andre Garzia]

Guys,

I have the following machines here:

iPhone 3G, iPad 1, Palm Pre2, Google Nexus S. Take the rest of the email as
personal opinion, I do not claim to speak The Truth but my own experiences.

=== iOS ===

The iOS machines are very polished and built by a company that understands
usability. They created a product to be easy to be used by the masses. It
was never a power user product. It has no features that can come as a
surprise or be misused by their gazillions users. They are GREAT PRODUCTS
and I recommend iOS stuff for my parents and many friends but I don't think
that iOS is the best product out there for power users or developers.

Developing for iOS is a mess due to all the provisioning stuff and Apple
devilish control of who-can-install-what. In essence, you don't control your
own machine. You can install whatever you want. If your friend built and app
that is not on the market, you will need to resort to ad-hoc distribution to
use it. It is a very bad system that punishes the developers. You can have a
curated market and still allow your users to install whatever they want.

>From a user point of view, iOS has a lot of apps so there is a chance that
if you want to do something that is on the
approved-list-of-things-you-can-do, you will find suitable apps. iOS has
tons of games and this is a big thing for many users. I think that iOS is
too protected by apple. For example, there is no bluetooth file transfer or
wireless sync and if you create apps to do this kind stuff, they will not be
accepted in the market.

=== Android ===

Android is a bazaar. It has everything but it is confusing. The usability is
not on par with iOS. This does not mean that you can't do stuff, just that
it is harder. By harder I mean:

* some stuff is in awkward places.
* It requires lots of touches to do simple things.
* It was made by google, so searching is the standard way of doing stuff,
you search for a contact, you search for games on the market, you search for
apps... yes you can go by hand using categories to find stuff but there is
exactly the place where usability sucks.

>From a developer point of view, android is a mixed blessing. For one,
distributing your stuff is really easy. There is a curated market (Actually
two markets) and yet users can install their own stuff from elsewhere if
they want. The ugly part begins when you start coding your resizeStack
handlers to cope with all the different resolutions. We need a better
geometry manager for mobile. Scripting resizeStack handlers by hand is very
tedious.

>From a user point of view, Android works but it is not the most user
friendly guy in the block. Android apps are less polished than iOS apps
mostly because the CocoaTouch stuff rocks and apps inherit everything.
Android is growing fast so there is a lot of excitement and oportunity. Here
in Brazil, most of my friends have Android phones.

=== Personal stuff ===

The phone I am carrying is the Nexus S mostly because of the camera. I love
taking pics and the camera of the iPhone 3G and Palm Pre2 are not even close
to the beautiful shots from the Nexus S. Just look at this pic:
http://fon.nu/14G0JK22

In my experience, the Nexus S and most of the Android phones are very hungry
for power. You need to disable many things to make your battery last. iPhone
power management is better. Android multitasking sucks. Applications stay in
memory and you have no easy way to quit them (Skype, I am looking at you).
It is still better than iOS multitasking for that does not exist, what apple
have now is not multitasking, it is quick launching and some couple resident
services, it is not true multitask.

All in all, I am happier with Android than with iOS mostly because the Nexus
S is way ahead iPhone 3G. If I was comparing the Nexus S to the iPhone 4,
then I think they have basically the same stuff but with Android you have
more power, for example, I have: Opera, Firefox, Dolphin, Webkit installed
on my Nexus S. Why so many browsers? Because I can and with Apple, I could
not.

=== Stuff of Legend ===

If you don't want to hear about systems that are not iOS or Android, stop
reading now because I will start talking about the best system that I've
ever used.

WebOS is the greatest thing to come to mobile ever, too bad it came with bad
hardware and stupid marketing decisions. If being stupid was an Olympic
sport, HP would hold the world record for the next 10 years.

WebOS has the best usability so far. Once you know the system and it takes
about 10 minutes to learn where everything is and how to use things, you
will never be surprised.

WebOS notifications are the best, better than iOS or Android.

Multitasking on WebOS is the best system I've ever seen and I am counting
desktops here. The cards metaphor is great, each application is a card, like
a playing card, you can stack them or flick thru them. When you want to shut
down a running application just throw the card up away from the phone, like
using your thumb or index finger and pushing the card away and then the app
is gone. Draging sideways switch apps. WebOS has a gesture area not on the
screen, in that area you can execute many gestures such as back, switch,
minimize, quick launch. Gestures are more powerful than the Android hardware
buttons or iPhone 1-button.

The synergy system that aggregates stuff works really well. For example, all
messaging is handled by the messaging app, no matter if it is SMS, MMS,
GTalk. These days iOS 5 may have something similar but WebOS had it in 2009.
For example, I've added my google accounts, my facebook account and my
mobileme account to my Pre2. All the calendars are in the same calendar app.
All the emails are in the same email program and the contacts and in the
address book. WebOS has some intelligence in it, for example, is
cross-referenced my facebook data and discovered that I was married to my
wife and liked the contacts. Its the little things that count. A friend sent
me and email with an invitation to a party, WebOS placed that in my
calendar. I haven't seen the email but when the time came and I was late,
the phone told me and asked if I wanted to warn the interested parties that
I was going to be late. As I said, the little things.

LiveCode has no WebOS support but the official SDK is very easy to use and
the official language is Javascript which in my opinion is better than
Objective-C and Java.

The only things that kept me on the Nexus S were the camera and the kindle
app but some stuff on Android is getting me kinda upset because I've used
WebOS and I know things should be easier. I am about to switch back to the
Pre2. I don't care that HP is a moron and want to put WebOS on printers. I
don't care that there will be no updates. I was more productive with WebOS
than I was with iOS or Android. iOS is shiny and simple. Android is
powerful. WebOS gets things done.

(PS: If anyone here has a Pre3 or  a TouchPad and wants to sell it, I am
buying)

Cheers
andre