Android Jelly Bean vs. iOS 6 vs. Windows Phone 8

A quick comparison on all the new 3 major Operating systems being released this year by 3 big companys

(For the record, this is not a review. There will be no review until we have spent some quality time with the final versions of iOS 6, Android 4.1 and Windows Phone 8. This is, instead, a look at how these three stack up on paper in 12 key categories.)

Apps

iOS: 650,000 apps. 225,000 for iPad. Still tops as far as smartphone platforms go.

Android: Android is currently at 450,000 apps for Android. Most apps will run on tablets, but the number of tablet-optimised offerings is significantly lower than iOS (Google won’t give an official number, but a quick run-through Google Play makes the situation abundantly clear).

Windows Phone: Windows Phone currently has 100,000 apps available for download, which is considerably less than the other two. And since there’s no Windows 8 tablet yet, well…

 

Maps

iOS: Apple now has a maps service of its very own like Google and Microsoft. Not only does it deliver traffic updates, points of interest, and turn-by-turn navigation (which is well integrated throughout iOS 6), there are 3D maps which both look cool and might be helpful when lost in the middle of a crowded metropolis. But the lack of public transit directions hurts, even if they’re offering a third-party API solution. 

And iPhone users reared on Street View might sorely miss it; Apple hasn’t presented an equivalent.

Android: Google Maps in Jelly Bean will likely be unchanged from what Google showed off a few weeks ago at its dedicated maps event: 3D buildings, offline caching and Yelp integration will all be added to supplement the top notch combination of search, turn-by-turn navigation, and Street View. Plus, the search giant is going crazy with mapping the insides of notable locales—Compass Mode employs a phone’s gyroscope to give you 360-degree interior views—so expect to see more of that over time.

Windows Phone: Windows Phone 7 was a showcase for Microsoft’s Bing maps, but the mobile navigation turf will belong to Nokia on Windows Phone 8. The good news is, that means terrific NAVTEQ maps, turn-by-turn navigation, 3D buildings, offline caching, and dynamic routing for public transit. There aren’t many bells and whistles here, though, for better or worse.

Browser Sync

iOS: iCloud Tabs are new in iOS 6, and unify your browsing across all of your iOS and OS X devices. It’s not a full cloud browser that offers the same tab view across all devices, but rather a list of tabs tucked behind an icon or sub-menu, along with your bookmarks.

 Android: The Chrome Beta on Android offers tab syncing with your desktop as well, but throws bookmark and search syncing in the bargain. And since there are more desktop Chrome users in the world than any other browser, a lot of people will be taking advantage of this feature.

Windows Phone: Browser sync is conspicuously absent from Windows Phone, which is odd considering it will run the same version of Internet Explorer that Windows 8 will in the WinRT environment. Then again, with Windows 8 and WP8 both not expected until this fall, there’s a lot of time for Microsoft to make this work. Fingers crossed.

 

Facebook Integration

iOS: Facebook is integrated throughout iOS 6, which means you can update your status and upload images from various apps (not to mention notification center), sync contacts, and have your Facebook events coordinate with your iOS Calendar. Plus a third-party API is on the way, so all apps can integrate Facebook into their wares.

Android: Android has always been good for Facebook sharing, and there’s no reason for that to change with Jelly Bean. You can share and upload from pretty much anywhere in the OS, or inside most Android apps. Plus you can pull Facebook data for your contacts already stored on your phone, or pull all your Facebook friends into your contacts.

Windows Phone: Facebook integration has always been one of Windows Phone’s selling points, as the platform seamlessly integrates features like status updates, images, Contacts, Chat, and Events into Microsoft’s own sections (People, Messaging, Calendar, etc). It’s as well-designed as Facebook integration can get.

Voice Commands

iOS: Siri wasn’t amazing in iOS 5, but it worked. In addition to being able to dictate texts and emails, schedule calendar events, and set timers, Siri in iOS 6 has much more promise, given its ability to pull data from even more sources (sports scores, movie times, dinner reservations), in more useful ways. Plus, Siri will be able to interface with car audio and navigation systems once iOS 6 goes live in the fall.

Android: With Jelly Bean, speech recognition is about to get a big update. Google has always allowed for voice search and dictation across the entire OS, but now it taps into Knowledge Graph and a built-in speech recogniser that will be in future devices. Not only should Android voice recognition improve dramatically, but it will recognise voice input even while offline and, like Siri, can spit back Wolfram-like semantic search results (with or without your voice).

Windows Phone: Windows Phone also has voice commands, allowing you to place calls, send texts, search the web, and launch an app all from your device. It may not have the depth of Google and Apple’s efforts, but it’s there.

Mobile Payments

iOS: Surprise! The iPhone doesn’t have NFC, which means Apple doesn’t have much to offer in terms of mobile payments. But Passbook is Apple’s way in. When it’s up and running, it will collect tickets, rewards cards, debit/credit cards and more into a single app relies on both GPS and QR codes to work. It can also deliver updates and notifications for the items you have stored in Passbook (flight updates, expiring deals, etc). It’s clearly been designed with NFC payments in mind; we just have to wait a few months until Apple makes it official.

Android: For the time being, Google Wallet—which includes mobile payments, deals/rewards/offers, and more—remains unchanged. But it is a HUGE question mark for Google. Sprint is still the only official Google Wallet mobile partner (and even they’re rumored to be parting ways), MasterCard is the only card company on board, and the number of devices NFC is available on is limited. Google announced new NFC-based features today unrelated to payments; hopefully it’s enough to entice hardware partners to include the tech in future devices.

Windows Phone: With the arrival of Windows Phone 8 will come Wallet, which is Microsoft’s full-fledged attempt at, well, a digital wallet. You’ll be able to store credit/debit cards and rewards/loyalty cards, not to mention the ability to access deals. But what might set Windows Phone apart from Android and iOS is that it will make use of secure NFC elements stored on SIM cards, which will allow for more flexibility—and security—when it comes to the preferred standards of card companies and mobile carriers (Google Wallet has hit a wall because of resistance to its own built-in secure elements). Save for Apple strong-arming everyone into playing by its rules, this may be the most frictionless way for NFC-based payment technologies to succeed.

Video Chat

iOS: Apple has FaceTime, which can place calls over 3G or Wi-Fi, and works fairly well. But its also a pretty insular app that only works with other Apple devices.

Android: Android’s Gmail/Google Talk-based video chat system is a bit more universal, considering you can video chat with anybody who has Gmail on a Mac, PC, or Android phone. And yes, you can chat over 3G or Wi-Fi. But Google’s ace in the hole, surprisingly enough, might just be its Google+ app, which features Hangout support and will be available for both Android and, some day soon, iOS.

Windows Phone: Microsoft’s secret voice chat weapon is Skype, which is arguably the most universal standard of them all. There are already proper Skype apps for Macs, PCs, iOS, and Android—and Microsoft owns all of them.

Call Features

iOS: iOS 6 lets you decline a call with a canned SMS response; filter out calls annoying contacts, and includes a Do Not Disturb toggle, all of which will prove useful for power users.

Android: Android lets you compose a series of texts you can use as quick auto-replies when declining a call, and also lets you filter out calls from specific people, but it lacks the ability to enter into a Do Not Disturb mode.

Windows Phone: This is another weak point in Windows Phone, as there are no pre-composed texts you can fire off to people you don’t want to talk to, nor is there any sort of Do Not Disturb functionality. But there are advanced filtering and call block options for those people you’re trying to avoid.

Messaging

iOS: iMessage is a beta feature with a lot of promise, given its ability to trade messages between phones, tablets and laptops. But it’s hardly seamless, and barely reliable, and not exactly intuitive. There’s currently no real way to link a phone number and iCloud account of a contact and have texts and iMessages appear in a single thread. Nor do messages always arrive to all your connected devices. And there’s no way to instant message with non-Apple users. We have yet to see the final implementation of this cross-device integration, which probably won’t be settled until iOS 6 is officially out, but there’s definitely some work to be done in this regard.

Android: With WebOS all but dead, Android has the best native instant messaging platform hands down. Sure it doesn’t integrate with AIM or Facebook, but AIM has a foot in the grave anyways, and Gchat is every bit as ubiquitous as Facebook Chat. When you’re logged in to Gchat, messages always arrive on all connected devices reliably and quickly. That’s more than can be said for iMessages. Plus, Google Voice is well integrated throughout Android, which means text messages sent from your phone or laptop stay perfectly synced.

Windows Phone: The messaging effort on Windows Phone is solid and well considered, allowing you to seamlessly send texts, Facebook messages, and Skype messages to a given contact from a single window. No, there’s no Gchat or AIM, but that’s not particularly shocking, given the trend towards walled ecosystems with each platform.

Smarter Icons

iOS: When it comes to dynamic app icons, Apple is sorely lacking. Sure it has badges that let you know when there are new messages, emails, or notifications, but they don’t really tell you anything else.

One of the things we’d hoped for was that Apple would smarten up its app icons. Let them change to display information. Unfortunately, Apple is still stuck in the past on this one.

Android: Android doesn’t really do much with app icons either, and that doesn’t change with Jelly Bean. But since the App drawer is pushed into the secondary layer of Android, it doesn’t matter. Android employs widgets to take on the task of real-time updates, which allows for a fair amount of customization when it comes to getting your mail/weather/calendar updates from your home screen in a quick manner. They can sometimes be messy and unruly, but when properly implemented, are quite useful.

Windows Phone: Windows Phone 8′s Live Tiles are the cream of the crop amongst smartphones. Not only can they display notifications and vital info (such as texts, mail, weather calendar events), but they arrange into a neatly-organized grid that is now bolstered by the ability to break tiles into three different sizes depending on how you want info displayed. Microsoft is way ahead of everyone else in this regard.

Media Streaming

iOS: iOS 6 has AirPlay, which has been one of the easier, more intuitive implementations of media streaming we’ve seen so far. You can push music from your computer or iOS device to AirPlay-approved speakers, AirPort Express routers, and Apple TV (which also accepts video and iOS device mirroring, and soon OS X mirroring). And if you’re streaming from a computer, you can push to multiple AirPlay devices. But like some of Apple’s other features (FaceTime, iMessage), AirPlay doesn’t really extend past the Apple product ecosystem. That said, you’ll find AirPlay baked into more and more devices with each passing month.

Android: With the introduction of the £200 Nexus Q, Google just provided its own streaming standard for Android-based devices. The hubs will be able to take audio and video streams, and spit them out to televisions and speakers (powered by the Q’s 25-watt amplifier). Plus you can link hubs together for more robust multi-zone streaming than what Apple offers. Think of it as Sonos for Android, complete with the modest sticker shock.

Windows Phone: Windows Phone will have SmartGlass to serve as its media streaming portal to the Xbox. Though built directly on top of DLNA streaming standards, the app simplfies and visualises the process of pushing content back and forth between the Xbox and Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 devices. Plus, SmartGlass can beam supplimentary content to your device while watching a TV show, such as Game of Thrones. Toss in the possibilities for gaming and support for Windows, Android, and iOs, and you have yourself a very intriguing streaming platform.

HTC to release Zenith, Accord, and Rio Windows Phone 8 devices

According to The Verge a source says HTC has already set out plans for the Windows Phone 8 platform.

Three devices will be coming this year from HTC running Windows Phone 8. First the RIO device will be a low-end device featuring a 4-inch WVGA display, a 5 megapixel camera with 720p video capture and 14.4,Mbps HSPA, 512MB RAM memory and a Qualcomm MSM8227 processor. The Accord will be the mid-range device and will have a 4.3-inch 720p Super LCD 2, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080 video capture, 1GB of RAM memory a dual-core processor, 42Mbps HSPA+, and support for NFC. The Zenith is said to be the high-end device sporting a 4.7-inch 720p Super LCD 2 with an 8-megapixel camera, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and 42Mbps HSPA+.

The devices are said to ship some point this year, with the Accord and Rio coming in October and Zenith coming sometime in Q4.

With the popularity of HTC’s Titan Windows Phones I’m really not surprised by these plans,and I’m sure they will be well received considering the boost of power that Windows Phone 8 will give to them. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Windows Phone 8 Unveiled: Microsoft Modernizes It

It’s shaping up to be a huge week for Microsoft. On Monday, the company announced its Surface tablet platform at a hush-hush event in Los Angeles, and now the company has unveiled Windows Phone 8 Apollo at its Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco.

Microsoft announced eight specific platform updates for its upcoming mobile OS. We’ve already covered one of the most consumer-facing updates, the new Start Screen, but other changes include hardware-related features like multi-core processor and memory card support, a revamped Internet Explorer 10, shared native code between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, NFC support, a new Wallet hub, Nokia Maps, and Windows Phone 8 for business.

Many of these updates shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering all the leaks and reports that came out in February. Nor was today’s announcement a full-fledged reveal like Apple’s iOS 6 presentation at WWDC. Microsoft says it will unveil more end-user features in the summer. But in the meantime, these platform updates are significant, and Microsoft had a lot to say about them.

Here’s a deeper dive into what we can expect from Windows Phone 8.

Hardware updates

As suspected, Windows Phone 8 will support multi-core chips. It’s a move that will make Windows Phone more competitive with the iPhone and Android handsets, which have been able to check off multi-core support on their spec sheets for quite a while. When they launch, Windows Phone 8 devices will run on dual-core processors, specifically those from Qualcomm.

“The experience that people have had on a single-core will get much, much better as we move to dual-core,” Joe Belfiore, manager of the Windows Phone Program, said at the event.


Windows Phone 8 is written for its hardware improvements. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired
Windows Phone 8 will also support three screen resolutions (Windows Phone 7.5 supports just one). The new screen resolutions include WVGA at 800×480 pixels and a 15:9 aspect ratio; WXGA at 1280×769 and 15:9; and 720p at 1280×720 at 16:9.

Rounding out the hardware story, Windows Phone 8 will support microSD card expansion. Hardware manufacturers can include a microSD slot for users to easily transfer information from device to device. “What this enables is that an end user can add a MicroSD card months after they’ve bought a phone and transfer information from PC to phone, and phone to phone,” Belfiore said. “We didn’t want to deliver this feature until we could do it where it’s easy to use.”

Revamped Internet Explorer 10

Microsoft showed off a new Internet Explorer browser for Windows Phone 8. The new IE 10 features Smart Screen, an anti-phishing filter that uses data from Windows PCs to block malicious websites in real-time. Belfiore showed off how IE 10 can protect users who might fall victim to scam links sent via email.



IE 10 SunSpider scores compared to other browsers on mobile operating systems. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired
IE 10 also receives a JavaScript update — JavaScript is now four times faster than the browser in Windows PHone 7.5, according to the company. There’s also two times as much HTML5 support.

How does mobile IE 10 compare to other mobile browsers? According to recent SunSpider scores that measures a browser’s JavaScript execution performance, IE 10 performed the best.

Shared Native Code

Windows Phone 8 will share native C and C++ code with Windows 8, making it easier for developers to create apps for both platforms. It’s not something that consumers will immediately notice when they use the OS, but Microsoft hopes shared native code will lead to better, faster app development — and thus more quality apps in Windows Phone Marketplace.

“The biggest effect this will have is we’re going to see some freaking killer games this year,” Belfiore said.


Windows Phone 8 will share core native code with Windows 8. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired
At its developer summit, Microsoft continually hammered on how easy it will be for developers to port games from Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8, and vice versa. “Suddenly, with Windows Phone 8 with that shared core, taking an app from the PC to phone is very straightforward,” Belfiore said.

In essence, native code will enable developers to write high-performance code — which is why games are such a big deal — and drive hardware acceleration. “You’re going to see some beefy, powerful phones running some amazing games this year,” Belfiore said.

NFC sharing

As suspected, Windows Phone 8 devices will support NFC sharing. NFC isn’t a totally new technology, but it’s far from ubiquitous, so it’s interesting to see Microsoft pushing it forward. Belfiore demoed how NFC would work in a Lexus advertisement with an embedded tag — he used the April issue of Wired magazine, actually: With a simple tap of his phone on top of the advertisement, he transferred product information directly to his Windows Phone.

Also, sharing isn’t limited to just phones. The new Microsoft platform supports NFC between phones, laptops, slates, and PCs. And NFC also has an important role in the next platform update…

Wallet Experience

Windows Phone 8 will feature a new Wallet hub where users can store their credit and debit card information, third-party loyalty and membership cards, and coupons and deals. It’s not unlike Apple’s iOS 6 Passbook app. But Windows Phone Wallet experience will also support NFC tap-to-pay.


The Wallet Experience carries all of your financial, deal, and loyalty card information. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired
Yes, it’s like Google Wallet, but with one fundamental difference. All of your credit and debit card information will be stored in a secure SIM card, not in an on-device system. Google Wallet is built directly into a device, making it impossible to move your Wallet info from one device to the next, but Windows Phone has opted for a more transition-friendly option.

Microsoft’s approach is also an experience that carriers prefer. But don’t get too excited just yet, as the NFC tap-to-pay capabilities won’t be coming to the U.S. until next year. At launch, the capability will be limited to the France-based Orange carrier. U.S. Windows 8 consumers, however, will still be able to access the Wallet hub as their central location for cards, third-party services, and deals.

Goodbye Bing Maps, Hello Nokia Maps

Say goodbye to Bing Maps. Windows Phone 8 maps will run on Nokia’s mapping technology, built directly into the onboard Maps app. There’s not too much news on this front, but this development isn’t surprising considering Microsoft and Nokia’s close ties. Some key features include: Global NAVTEQ map data, offline map support, turn-by-turn directions, and map control for developers. 3D navigation didn’t make it.

Windows Phone 8 for Business

Microsoft has always had a strong hold on the enterprise market with Windows, and now it’s taking all of that work and pulling it together with a business-friendly Windows Phone platform. Windows Phone 8 will come with a complete security platform with Secure Boot and encryption (which is a derivative of Windows Bitlocker). It’ll make app distribution and deployment flexible for business, offering up a mechanism for private distribution and full-on onsite management.

Businesses will also be able to manage Windows Phone 8 devices through a software management system. And finally, Windows Phone 8 will run the Microsoft Office suite — though we have yet to see how it will look in that mobile form.

New Start Screen

Ah, the new Start Screen. “It’s the sexiest thing in Windows Phone 8,” Belfiore said. And this should definitely the case for more visually motivated users. As we wrote in our story about the Start Screen and current Windows Phone devices, the new Start Screen is the most visible end-user feature of Windows Phone 8 (at least that’s been announced so far).


Microsoft has taken its Live Tiles and made them more customizable, bringing a new small size to the experience.


The Windows Phone 8 Start Screen will take up the whole display and feature three sizes of Live Tiles. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired
“These live tiles are the heart and soul of the Windows Phone,” Belfiore said. “We know that our users really love their phones, and we think the biggest reason is because Live Tiles make the phones so special and so personal.”

Users will be able to choose between a small, medium and large size for their Live Tiles. And now the entire screen is available for Live Tile pinning — the arrow and empty space on the right-hand side have dissapeared. To that end, users can pin more on their Start Screen.

And of course, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 are coming even closer together. As Microsoft said, they’re “better together.”

“The intent in our changing the Live Tiles support is not just to make Live Tiles more personal, but to give a more consistent experience between Windows 8 Live Tiles and Windows Phone 8 live tiles,” Belfiore said.