Industry News
Best Cell Phone Operating System: Android? Apple? Windows?
Posted on March 8, 2011
It's pretty incredible how much progress has been made in the field of cell phone operating systems in the last couple of years, to the point that a circa-07 phone might as well be a rotary desk phone with a curly cord.
When considering what are the best cell phone operating systems, Android, iPhone and Windows are the industry leaders in the U.S. but each one does have its strengths and weaknesses:
- Android's Application Framework enables users to reuse and replace components to suit their own needs. The optimized graphics for the application support 2D or 3D visuals; Android also comes with such bells-and-whistles as debugging tools, accelerometer, SQLite, GSM telephony features and others. It's tougher to do these upgrades and customizations on a Windows 7 phone. A weakness of Androids, however, is multitasking – while it has the capability, multitasking tends to kill the phone's battery pretty quickly.
- Windows 7 phones still have some catching-up to do. While Android phones do just fine with a processor speed of below 500 MHz, Windows 7 devices require a minimum of 1 GHz to perform well. That, of course, means that the front-end price of getting a phone with that sort of capability is going to be fairly steep. Windows 7 is also not as good at multitasking as Android, and the number of apps available for Windows phones is still a little skimpy. Expect all that to change in the next year or two, though.
- Apple is still setting the bar in terms of selection of apps and overall functionality. Ironically, the complaints that are starting to build up in regards to iPhones relate to how well they actually work as phones without dropping calls. A lot of those gripes are laid at the feet of Verizon as the provider, and word has it that Verizon is working with Apple to iron some of those bugs out of the system.
Which cell phone operating system do you prefer? Why?
