Should You Buy An Iphone Or An Htc Android Phone?

By Author: Bonny Kominek
Total Articles: 50
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The successful launch of the iPhone in 2007 has seen a flurry of imitators emerge, keen to grab a slice of the emerging smartphone market. The most successful of these imitators has been Google, with its own Android smartphone operating system, as used on phones made by various manufacturers such as Motorola and HTC.

The other major contenders in the smartphone operating system market are Symbian and Windows Mobile. However, development on the Symbian OS shut down last year, and Windows Mobile has largely failed to catch on with consumers and software developers.

For many people, Android phones represent a lower priced alternative to the somewhat expensive iPhone. In America, sales of Android phones have recently overtaken the iPhone, and it is expected that Android will become the dominant platform for mobile phones in the coming years, in much the same way that Microsoft Windows has become the dominant platform for computers over the past two decades.

At the moment, there are a lot more cheap and free apps available for the Android platform, but the iPhone still has the edge in terms of higher quality, ...
... more expensive apps. For example, you can get Segas Football Manager for the iPhone, whereas you can only currently get the markedly inferior Real Football Manager for the Android.

With the iPhone, you have to use the in-built Safari browser, and while this is better in many respects than the browsers available for Android, it does not support Flash, so if you want to view websites that contain Flash content on the move, you will need to get an Android phone.

The media player app that comes with the iPhone, iTunes, is one of the best around, which is just as well, because it is the only media player and content library that you can access with an iPhone. Furthermore, all iTunes content is copy protected, which makes that you cannot synchronise it easily with other devices, especially if they are using different software.

There are lots of different media player applications for the Android platform, and while none of them are quite as slick as iTunes, they are a lot more flexible in many respects. You are not tied to buying content from the one supplier, and it is a lot easier to synchronise content between devices.

Android phones have something of a home advantage when it comes to using Googles popular services, such as Google Tasks, Google Maps, Goggles, Gmail, and Google Earth. You can, of course, use these with an iPhone, but it is a lot more fiddly, and the implementation is not as good. This comparison of smartphone operating systems was written by Bonny Kominek. For great deals on smartphones such as the iPhone and the HTC Desire, go to the Vodafone website.