I recently bought an iPhone 4S, because it’s finally on Sprint! I’ve owned a 1^st gen iPod touch for a year, but a lot has changed since then. Yet, iOS 5 still has a similar look and feel, but more features have made it way more productive.

Some of the features I like the most about iOS: fast app switching, excellent battery life (I’ve never had problems, despite the bad press Apple has received), plethora of apps, gorgeous screen, and musicality. Yes, other platforms have fast app-switching, but iOS gets it done quicker. A home button double-tap takes no time, and the scrolling list stretches for miles, and includes media playback controls! On other platforms, you have to hold a button for at least a second, and then the switching begins. Even then, it’s not as useful as the iOS way.

I get excellent battery life with my iPhone and with the HTC Trophy. I’ll admit, at times I was afraid to use my Android phone because I didn’t want to eat up battery life and not make it through the day without recharging. Some people have told me that Facebook Android app notifications can really drain the battery. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I think that it’s ridiculous that installing (or uninstalling) a single app can ruin the experience of the whole phone.

With the plethora of apps, there’s no shortage of what the iPhone can do. The app sandboxing is nice in that I can install whatever app I want without fear of ruining the whole phone. One thing I noticed with Android is that as you install apps and widgets, the system doesn’t run as smoothly, and the phone takes a hit on battery life. The awesome user interface looks amazing on the screen.

The one thing my phone does more than anything else is play music. Playback controls are well integrated with the entire iOS, from the lockscreen to the fast app-switching. iTunes Match (unfortunately delayed) is going to make buying and enjoying music even more awesome.

Even after singing Apple’s praises, there’s plenty that I don’t like about the iPhone. I wish that apps could share data on the phone. When I installed the Google apps, I had to log into my Google account within every app. Though it’s a one-time thing, it’s still annoying that I can’t log in once and use those credentials within different apps. There are security advantages that apps can’t directly share data between each other on the phone. Data sharing will just have to occur over the air.

Overall, iOS is a fantastic mobile operating system. It’s intuitive and easy to use, yet powerful enough to be productive in everyday use.

Android

My first smartphone was a Windows Mobile. After that terrible experience, I moved onto an HTC Evo and then a Samsung Nexus S 4G. Android is a decent mobile OS, and honestly I’m excited about the new features that Google is bringing in Ice Cream Sandwich. With any open system, it’s prone to abuse and insecurity. The burden of security lies primarily on the user: apps are not screened in the Marketplace and you have to confirm the app’s permissions when you install. Seriously, who actually reads what the app requests? Even if the app only asks for “internet permissions”, security was seriously compromised on certain HTC Sense phones.

From a user experience standpoint, some may argue that iOS is too simple. Widgets, custom home-screen launchers, and limited app backgrounding are fully in place on Android. These tweaks might we appropriate for a desktop system with copious resources and screen real estate. On a mobile device, I need to do certain things quickly and efficiently: email, calendar, and music. Most of the time my phone plays music, and I love that the iPhone is built around the iPod. It’s a phenomenal music player. Double tap the home button, and bam, you get playback controls on the lockscreen. Within any app, double tap the home button, swipe to the right, and music controls are ready to roll.

I think it’s terrible that the user experience changes from device to device. It’s quite nice to have an iPhone 4S, and overall it’s as easy to use as my 1^st gen iPod touch. Of course there are tons of awesome new features (amazing camera, Siri, best mobile gaming, etc.), but the day-to-day operation is a seamless transition.

Windows Phone 7

My up-and-coming favorite is WP7. I got an HTC Trophy for my work phone, and it’s a great blend of what’s good about Android and iOS. The recently released Mango update brings a boatload of amazing features. It’s not without its quirks and room for improvement, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

I really enjoy the consistent user experience of all WP7 devices I’ve used. It’s commendable that Microsoft has minimum hardware requirements for devices, so a manufacturer can’t put WP7 on a device willy-nilly. It’s a good way to ensure that crappy devices don’t tarnish the Windows Phone brand and experience. Overall the phone runs silky smooth is fun to use.

Music playback is a key feature which has been drastically improved in Mango. Playback controls are always on the lockscreen when you have media queued up or playing. It’s super easy to switch tracks or pause playback. I’m not a big fan of the Zune software, because it’s more confusing than iTunes. I’ve subscribed to some podcasts on the Trophy, and it’s quite easy to manage downloads and listen.

Mango brought some much needed features, like app fast resuming, though it still needs some more polish. It’s easy to hold down the back button and switch back to the last 5 launched apps, but I don’t always use it. Let’s say that I’m in the Spotify app listening to music, but then I go back to the home screen to check out a live tile or something. With a Mango-ified app, I could hold the back button and get right back into the app. But if I re-launch the app from the home screen, it completely reloads the app instead of the fast resume. I think it would be easy to implement something that checks if the app you’re launching is on the recently ran list. Then you do a fast resume instead of a full start.

I love the social integration in Windows Phone 7. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and your contacts are very nicely merged together. Even messaging is integrated between Facebook and texts. Now if only we could get a decent Google chat client for WP7…

There are many apps available for Windows Phone, and they recently passed a significant milestone of 40,000 apps in the Windows Marketplace. Most of the apps I’ve used are very high-quality. Many major apps are available, but it’s still not the caliber of iOS and Android apps. For example, you can search and do many things on the Yelp app, but you can’t check-in with the WP7 version for some reason. There still isn’t a Mint.com app yet.

These are a small selection of my experience with all three platforms. Because of maturity and selection of apps, I’d rank iOS #1 in my book. Windows Phone is super slick, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone considering a new smartphone. Next year dual-core and LTE is coming to WP7, which will make it more competitive within the industry. Android still has a lot of maturing to do. The overall system isn’t well integrated and runs sluggish many times, even on my stock “official Android” Nexus S. We’ll see what happens in a couple of years when Gartner and IDC predict that Windows Phone will become the 2^nd most popular mobile OS (and I hope it comes true).

http://code.google.com/p/core-plot/

Apple iPad

The Apple iPad will be released next month, and how will it change technology and what we do? Analysts predict that there will be heavy adoption among enterprises. It’s conceivable that professionals like insurance adjusters and doctors would greatly benefit from great apps on the iPad. But what does the iPad offer to the everyday consumer?

I recently purchased an iPod touch, which already has changed how I do things. Take my morning routine for example: after I take a shower I read my email. I used to do this on my laptop, but it’s a hassle to type in my password and read my email with the a trackpad. I now check my morning mail on my iPod touch, which suits me well because I don’t need to reply to anyone at 7:30 in the morning.

I would love to substitute an iPad for my morning routine. I think that even for the older generation that might not be comfortable with computers, an iPad would be great for them. The touch interface is intuitive, there are plenty of apps, and their grandchildren would certainly get less calls asking for tech support.

Why would any rational customer pay for a TV show or movie on the iTunes Music Store over watching it for free on Hulu? Personally, I don’t mind the small commercial breaks, and it’s totally worth watching shows on Hulu. Content providers probably feel the same way. I’m sure that they make more money on an iTMS download than a user view on Hulu.

YouTube has started to embed ads in videos now. Thanks to Flash, these ads are very easy to integrate in the YouTube video player, and Google can ensure that users see the ads when videos play. It’s probably the reason why YouTube has finally been able to turn a profit.

Recently, YouTube has allowed users to opt-in to playing videos with HTML5 support. It has that beta behavior, but I’ve tried it in Safari and Chrome, and it works pretty well. It’s nice, but I think that YouTube will stick with Flash for a long time. If Google permanently switched to HTML5 (Wikipedia link), it would alienate a huge number of users (sadly most people still run some version of Internet Explorer).

It would also be hard sell for advertisers to pay YouTube. Flash has a great way of insuring that a user sees an ad. If they switched to HTML5, the burden of playing the ad moves exclusively to the client. If YouTube relied on HTML and JavaScript to deliver ads, someone could easily create a GreaseMonkey script or bookmarklet to skip ad playback or block the ads.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like a lot of the features that HTML5 is going to bring to the web. Local client storage, easy video playback, CSS3, and the like are going to be amazing. It’s going to gain a lot of traction, but it won’t be in YouTube.

If you’re just getting started with handling the accelerometer on the iPhone, I highly recommend this tutorial.

Download the source code from the UniMotion project. Make sure that you have XCode installed, unzip the folder, and with the Terminal.app change directory into the folder. Type “make” and wait the code to compile. Make sure your MacBook is laying flat, type “./calibrate”, and then press control+c to quit the program.

Now we want to broadcast the MacBook accelerometer data to a network interface. This is where the iFiddling python script comes in handy. Copy the code from the page, and save it in a file called “sendaccsim.py”. As a side note, if you’re super security conscious and you want to keep the network traffic just on your machine, comment out the 7th line, so it says:

#sock.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_BROADCAST, 1)

and change the approximately 27th line, so it says:

sock.sendto(accdata, ('localhost', 10552))

So basically what this is doing is taking the input from the stdin on the console in the form of x, y, z (the accelerometer output), attaches a timestamp, and broadcasts it out on your loopback interface on UDP port 10552. To continuously broadcast this data, make sure that the calibrate, motion, libUniMotion.dylib, and sendaccsim.py are in the same directory. In the Terminal.app, change to the directory and type:

./motion -f 17 | python sendaccsim.py

The “-f” flag converts the output so the x, y, and z values are scaled to something like -2.0 to +2.0 (which is what the iPhone does) and the “17″ flag makes the output continuous. If you want to make sure it’s working, uncomment the print line near the bottom of the script.

Now we’re just about ready to tie it all back into the simulator. Look at the accelerometer-simulator project on Google Code. Download a copy of the project with the following command:

svn checkout http://accelerometer-simulator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/accelerometer-simulator read-only

There are two files of interest from the package: “accelerator-simulator-read-only\AccSim\Simulator Classes\AccelerometerSimulation.h” and “AcclerometerSimulation.m”. In your iPhone project, right click on the “Classes” folder, select “Add”, and browse to those two files. After clicking “Add”, check the box that says “Copy items into destination group’s folder” and click “Add”.

Now in your controller class that acts a UIAccelerometerDelegate, go to the “.h” header file for your controller. At the top, add the following:

#import "AccelerometerSimulation.h"

Now you can use a UIAccelerometer just like an iPhone, because the AccelerometerSimulation does a really good job of imitating the real deal. Basically this opens up a socket, and listens to UDP packets on a port and interprets the data as accelerometer output. With our script continuously running, you can run your iPhone app in the simulator, and it grab your MacBook’s swaying motions and pipe it into the simulator.

Alternatively, you could not have the script running. Open up the AccSim XCode file in the accelerometer-simulator project and install the AccSim.app on your iPhone or iPod touch. Make sure they’re on the same Wi-Fi network that allows broadcasting. Run AccSim on your iPhone and make sure that the network option is turned on. Then when you run your testing app inside the simulator, it’ll capture accelerometer data from your iPhone through the network. Very cool!

If you want to test your app on different firmware versions outside of the iPhone simulator, this website has a huge list of all firmware binaries for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Everything is straight from Apple. There are also carrier profiles, basebands, and recovery files (for older iPhones). I’ve found it to be very useful.

Stanford recorded and released their intro to iPhone programming course as a podcast last year. I got about half way through this class before starting my internship last summer. All the course materials, assignments, and lectures are freely available online (and some solutions if you Google).

The class is taught by developers that work at Apple, and they really know their stuff. I learned a ton about objective-C, iPhone’s MVC paradigm, and how to quickly get developing on the iPhone.