Hijinks Inc.

Tag: iOS

  • Five Things iOS Could Learn from Android

    Previously I featured a list of five things Android could learn from iOS, to be fair and balanced, here’s my list of five things iOS could learn from Android.
    Again, this is a randomly ordered list.

    1. Notifications. iOS has a terrible notification system, they could learn a lot from Android on this one.

    2. Toggles. Quick toggles for turning Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS on and off without having to opening the settings. How hard is that?

    3. Widgets. For the love of all things pure and holy, please add some widgets! At least to the home screen.

    4. Cloud syncing. Sure a MobileMe account let’s you sync your Calendar/Contacts/etc, but $99 a year is a joke. Go free, or go home.

    5. App store queuing. I buy an app on iOS and it takes me out of the app store and to one of my homescreens, I want to buy another app I have to go back into the app store. Huh?

  • Five Things Android Could Learn from iOS

    These aren’t ordered in any particular manor, just a random list of five things that iOS does better than Android 2.2.

    1. Style. Android is nice looking, but a little utilitarian in places. Whereas iOS is sleek and stylish to the very end.

    2. App badges. Androids task bar notifications are great, but badges are handy for those lower priority apps, not to mention inbox counts.

    3. Centralized settings.  I really like the fact that iOS lets app developers include a settings page inside of Settings.app.

    4. Parental controls. Android seems to be lacking even basic options for parental controls.

    5. Remote wipe. Yes,  they have APIs to enable applications to do this, but let’s see a native app ship with the OS.

  • Mobile Browser Shootout

    Everyone is entitled to their own favorite smartphone, but I think we all can agree that some phones just do certain things better. Today, let’s take a quick look at how various mobile browsers fair in the Acid3 test.

    Default browsers for the platforms:

    Android 2.2

    93/100
    No screenshot, because I haven’t rooted my Droid X yet. I know, I know, I fail at life…

    webOS 1.4.2

    92/100

    webOS_1.4.2_acid3.png

    webOS 2.0 (developer beta)

    91/100
    Wait… the performance of the browser actually went down with a new build of the OS?

    webOS_2.0_acid3.png

    iOS (tested 3.1.3 through 4.2)

    100/100

    Third-party browsers:

    Skyfire 2.3 Beta (Android)

    93/100

    Opera Mini 5.1.21126 (Android)

    97/100

    Opera Mini 5.0.019802 (iOS)

    97/100

  • New iPods? Yes please.

    Apple just finished live streaming their latest press event, which for starters is pretty awesome that they finally live streamed it! Outside of announcing the expected  new iPod touch, they also announced a new Shuffle and a new Nano.


    For me, the new iPod touch is the most interesting. Retina display, front and rear facing cameras, HD video recording, A4 chip. All the things you’d expect after the iPhone 4, but it’s nice to see that Apple actually include all those updates in one refresh. 8GB model is $229, 32GB for $299, 64GB for $399.


    I don’t really care about the Shuffle, but I do think it’s interesting that Steve had to concede and bring buttons back to please the users. New 2GB version of the Shuffle is $49.


    Nano looks pretty slick, loses the video camera and click-wheel and moves to a nice square touchscreen and adds a clip on the back. 8GB for $149, 16GB for $179.

    iOS 4.1 is dropping next week for the iPhone / iPod touch bringing HDR camera mode, Game Center, TV show rentals, and general bug fixes to the table. But better yet, iOS 4.2 hits in November for iPhone / iPad / iPod touch with wireless printing being the big feature of interest to me.