1. Voice Commands across multiple apps. You can literally talk to the phone to accomplish complex tasks.
2. True multi-tasking in the background. The app is kept alive in the background as a process, while the iOS suspends the app and stops it from running.
3. Flash support. iPhone has absolutely no support or future plans to support for Flash.
4. No need of a media player like iTunes. iPhone is completely depended on iTunes. You need iTunes to activate and install apps on the phone. Many people think iTunes is slow and quite buggy at times.
5. No curated App Store. You can run anything you want on the Android platform. There is not watchdog to dictate what you can run on your device.
6. Native Google Apps support, Google Voice, Google Navigation. Many Google client apps are not available on the iPhone. For one, Apple would not allow some of them in the App Store for whatever reason. Also, Google never published an iPhone app for it.
7. Better battery life than iPhone 4? Someone will have to do some extensive testing to confirm this one.

For iPhone 4, iOS 4:

1. Apple’s multi-tasking API allows for a much more efficient structure of doing background processes. Multiple apps share the same common background process, which gives more battery life and better performance. At the end, it accomplishes the exact same thing. You have to keep an app running on Android to receive offline line instant messages, iPhone uses Push Notification API while the app quit.
   
2. Flash support is quite immature on any mobile platform. I have been trying to run it ever since the Windows Mobile days on a XScale processor running at 624MHZ. It was slow and generally unusable. Even worse, it eats battery! It’s rare that you can’t find an alternative to a popular Flash game in the App Store. For videos? HTML 5 + Apple Quicktime X work wonders. I streamed Apple’s last media event LIVE on my iPhone! It worked both on iPhone 3G and iPhone 4.
3. iTunes is thankfully the most useful and popular media player in the world. I admit its performance is lacking in some areas, but I’m sure a company that is worth more than the mighty Microsoft will eventually release something faster. Having said that, there is a reason why people use iTunes. If you care about the quality of your music, and your library isn’t full of MP3 rips you got from P2P… iTunes really works well. iTunes uses 256k ACC format which is several times the compression ratio than MP3, and the quality is just night and day. Get a pair of descent speaker or headphones and you will hear the difference.
4. Curated App Store is not always a bad thing. It’s a watchdog to make sure bad stuff doesn’t end up on your phone. The Android app market is perhaps too open for the same reason we ended up installing anti-viruses and firewalls on our PCs. While the review process is not perfect, but I feel a lot safer that Apple at least does look at every app that gets into the store. It’s all about quality and standards!
5. GV Mobile was just approved by Apple to the App Store. So go download it if you use Google Voice. There is MapQuest Mobile on iPhone that will give you what Google Nav has. Google just chose not to release a Nav app on the iPhone… Not really Apple’s fault. It’s dirty competition which both sides did play.
6. Are voice commands that useful? Would you be speaking out loud to your phone when you on the bus? Walking down the street? or even when you are at home? Sure you may be able to do a lot of cool things with voice control… but I still feel more reassured to use my fingers. Voice commands are subject to interpretation… fingers are still much more accurate and trouble-free.
7. Battery life is awesome on the iPhone 4. People just need to know how to use their phones! The reason why Engadget and Walt Mossberg both nearly got 38hr of battery life on the iPhone 4 was because they knew how to work it! Read some of my findings here to get a longer lasting iPhone. I don’t have a Droid X to test it with, but I’m heavy user. I have 4 Exchange accounts, and 10+ apps with Push Notification enabled. I’m always on 3G and I listen to music and stream podcast occasionally. Ever since I got the iPhone 4, I have never found a single situation where I wanted to use the phone and the battery is out. The iPhone is always on, and I charge it every one or two days. I will be writing more on iPhone battery life management later on, I think there are a lot user out there who don’t know how to use the battery, and Apple really did not do a very good job of conveying that knowledge to users.
8. The Retina Display on the phone is amazing! It’s the sharpest display I have ever seen in my life. It’s super bright and super crisp! It also offers A LOT more pixels than any Android phones! For the Droid X, it’s 409,920 vs. 614,400 pixels! That’s a big difference.
9. People say well, so for you iPhone users to do what Android does you have to jailbreak and void the warranty on your device… Well if you go around and speak to iPhone users… they’ll ask you… what do I need that requires jailbreaking? While it may be apparent to geeks, the truth is that most people already got what they need directly from Apple! The phrase “there’s a app for that!” didn’t just come from nowhere.
10. This last point is against Android as a whole. There are how many different versions of the Android OS now? The most current versions can’t even run on older devices. However you can still put iOS 4.1 on a two year old iPhone 3G, and Apple had fixed all the performance issues. If you go take a look at numbers published by Google. You will realize that because there are so many different versions of Android and so many different devices… the market-share of each OS release is extremely inconsistent. This can be quite problematic for developers. Furthermore, from what I can tell… you cannot run OS 2.2 Froyo on older devices. The carriers still dictate what OS is available on your phone! That’s something iPhone stood against on day 1.

I’ll let it end there for now, and this is a rather hot topic so please voice any opinion you may have. However, I’d like to say that at the end of the day… it all boils down to personal preference. You will also choose what works best for yourself. While we may disagree, that doesn’t we have to be rude about it. Like what Steve Jobs said during the D8 Conference - “Just because we are competing with them (Google) doesn’t mean we have to be rude about it.”
I think the point of this debate is bring good ideas out in the open, so we can learn from other users’ perspectives and go back to the manufacturers with an updated list of demands. =p

On Google’s blog an article titled “A new approach to China: an update” Google blamed the move on the alleged cyber attacks originated from China to various US companies including itself. It has also posted an accessibility report to indicate which of the Google services are currently being blocked. Bold move Google!

Now to a more serious note… Was Google absolute right to do what it did? Was the Chinese government absolutely wrong to censor content on the Internet? Lastly, how will this affect the Internet users and companies in China?

We all know that the Chinese Internet market is the largest piece of the pie. That is to say there are more users in China than any other country in the world… surprised? However, looking at the revenue report from Google… the Chinese market was only about 2% of the total revenue… not a big number for a company of Google’s size. While its operations in China was growing at a rapid rate, censorship from the government greatly prohibited its every move. Youtube was blocked… Picasa partially blocked… so was Gmail at some point. This sort of a hostile landscape probably made it quite difficult for an open company like Google to compete with native Chinese companies who are in total compliance with state censorship laws. Therefore, in order for Google to operate in China it will have to essentially become one of the censor dogs…

Google CEO Eric Emerson Schmidt repeated said on numerous occasions – Google is not about revenue, it is about expediting the flow of information and innovation. However… here is the catch… he did sign an agreement with the Chinese government to perform censorship on its search results… Is it legal and totally righteous of them to pull out from something they agreed to?

My hunch is that… everyone thought of the Chinese market as the biggest pile of cash to be made. However, Google really wasn’t doing well in China to start with! It watched as competitors like Baidu continue to gain marketshare… not by innovation… but by simply doing what the government tells them to do. Not wanting more revenue? Give me a break… everyone wants more money… enough said.

One must understand,  in such a sensitive country… politics and money are two of the dominating forces that drive its local economy. Political power = money, and the reverse is also true. This ill-designed system is being governed by a single political body that gains power by silencing the people who dare to speak up about its corruptions. Therefore, in order to keep this delicate platform, the Chinese like to keep its businesses local. They can’t possibly control a company like Google… at least not in the same way they do with Baidu!

So was it right for Google to pull out? As a strict legal matter, no it was not. You cannot change your mind about a legal agreement simply because you are not profiting from it to justify your costs. Was the Chinese government right to censor content to begin with? From a pure economic perspective, I have to say YES. By keeping the businesses local and discouraging foreign companies like Google, the Chinese economy is becoming self-sustainable and is growing at a rapid speed. There is corruption in the government, but they are not idiots. They designed the system, they know how to work it!

So who is this sudden game changer affecting? What are the end users saying? Well according to reports, there seems to be a divide… again…surprised? Some people have cursed Google to get out of China altogether. Others are saying they’ll just switch to Baidu. I think in the short-term Google’s exile will not likely affect the average Chinese user. When I was in China in 2008… people were already treating Baidu like their Google. Many people didn’t even know what Google was… others simply complained about its lack of localized Chinese results. However, in the long-term… the lack of competition is never a good sign for any industry.

Now the real beneficiary is definitely Baidu.com. It stock in China and US had gotten a much anticipated boost from all this. The same can be said for the Facebook clone – RenRen.com and video sharing site – TuDou.com. As Google said its long goodbyes to the Chinese market, I think there really wasn’t a real loser this time around. It looks to me that everyone went home with something in their pocket… Google has its publicity and seemed righteousness. The Chinese government successfully kept competition on the other side of the gate in order to grow its own economy. The users… well the users didn’t win anything but didn’t lose much either. We might even see a boom of local Chinese Internet start-ups because of this… especially when everyone knows that the government will help them kick their competitors out.

Update: GoDaddy.com has suspended registration of .cn domains in China due to the fact that the communist government is asking the company to submit personal information of its customers. I must say that I am quite disgusted by the Chinese government’s stance on these privacy issues.

Think again,

Google Sync has been having a lot of technical problems lately. Just today, the service was complete offline for hours. The only thing Google said was they were having issues with a datacenter and no ETA on fixing the problem. see this support post here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=35f2df27a467e56c&hl=en

Now here is the double edged sword… Microsoft Exchange… or more accurately its implementation on these “smart” phones. When the service was down today… users (including myself) noticed that our contacts, calendar events, and emails were wiped out! Completely gone! I didn’t even know who was texting me anymore… because my iPhone could only show the caller ID.

Shouldn’t the iPhone be smart enough to say… “ok, the Google server is down…” or “what I’m about to do will wipe out 100% of the phone’s contacts… maybe I should ask the user before I do this…”

The server went dark… doesn’t mean the data on the phone needs to as well. Even if data on one end is wiped out… the user should be consulted in order to make an intelligent decision.

So guys… Google isn’t perfect… free services like Sync are even less perfect… However, if Google is serious about making Sync into a business oriented service they could at least be more transparent and responsible about technical issues. For example, adding Sync to the App status dashboard. http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

Lastly, since Android and Blackberries have their own layer of protocol for sync, they were not affected by the Google Sync downtime today.

Update: as of Thursday, March 04. 10: 27 EST   Google Sync is still not pushing emails through in a timely manner. It is working for some users as mentioned in the support forum, but most users are still experiencing delays.

Update x2: Thursday, March 04 11:30 EST   Sync appears to be working, emails are being pushed with little to no delay. We’ll see how long it’ll last.

Upate x3: According to this post on Google Support. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=00d6bd3123867436&hl=en Another maintenance was performed for Sync and all issues have been resolved as of March 4th.

I think the guys from gdgt just compiled the source from the Chromium OS project… and using this as bait to increase traffic to their site. Anyway, they did an ok job and you do have to register on gdgt to download it.

Here are some screenshots of Chrome OS.

The OS looks extremely similar to the Chrome browser, and it is basically a complete standalone version of Google Chrome. This early developer build has very little configurable options… actually apart from those security and web related options you get from the Chrome browser there are only options to enable Tap to Click, and some mouse/touchpad sensitivity settings.

From the screenshots you will notice that ChromeOS detected that it is running on a laptop computer and it has a space to display battery levels. You can also config timezone settings. The only problem was that the screen resolution was locked to 1024 x 768 and could not be changed.

Page rendering performance was also quite poor, possibly due to the lack of 3D acceleration from the VM. This is very noticeable as you scroll up and down, and when you have a Flash movie loaded.

That’s right, Flash is supported! Youtube works… but the performance is horrible, and again probably due to the lack of graphic acceleration.

From what I can tell from this early development version of Chrome OS, I’d say that Google has done a great job of moving from desktop computing to cloud computing, and bringing desktop applications to web applications. From the start, you login with your Google ID and everything you see is generated and supported by the cloud… and of course the courtesy of an active connection to the Internet.

Aside from the buzz it has generated, Chrome OS is not going to be too useful to the average user right now. Especially when you have Windows or MacOS preinstalled on your machine already. Maybe it will make more sense for low-power netbooks, but even then it will be useless without access to the Internet.