I Eat S%#T Like You For Breakfast

I will likely buy an iPhone now. That is settled. Not because I think the OS is better than Android, but because I think it’s finally mature enough to handle my daily tasks without compromising my productivity. Android has done that from the beginning. Multitasking? Check. Folders? (Kind of) Check. iAd? Google’s done unobtrusive ads very well. Game network? Unnecessary, but interesting. iBooks is kind of cool, I’d like to have that native eBook integration into Android.

But Android will continue to be the enthusiasts’ OS. Google doesn’t add superfluous features. The OS may have been buggy, and at times still is, but it’s robust and full-featured, and has the ability to mod it without having to risk getting banned from the company itself. Remember when Devteam members who were involved in jailbreaking the iPhone OS got their log in banned from iTunes? Yeah, that doesn’t happen on Android.

There is no dogmatic scrutiny of every app released, compared to whether it will interfere with core functionality of the OS. Android encourages competition. Opera Mini on iPhone? Yeah, right. It won’t happen. There are something like six browsers on Android, and it encourages competition. It engages developers to want to increase the quality of their apps.

So, yes, when iPhone OS 4.0 comes out this summer it will change the lives of the millions of people who use iPhone 3GS (not compatible with 2G and 3G versions, likely due to the lower RAM amounts in the OS) and the updated iPhone (3GSX?) on a daily basis. And, yes, I will use Slacker while in the background while I’m tweeting and browsing the web. But for me it won’t be much different to the way I currently use my Nexus One, which runs Android 2.1, or even my HTC Magic, which runs OS 1.5. As I said, Android did it from the beginning, and I think in the end its users will come out on top.