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This is Apple’s forte. The company typically re-asks old questions and comes up with better answers than we’ve seen in the past. It holds true for nearly everything that the company does…outside of the iPhone. The iPhone was a complete re-thinking of how mobile devices should operate, rather than perfecting an existing recipe.
Today’s iOS 5 announcements were huge. There’s no denying that. But what it did with the OS was nothing that we haven’t seen before. It’s just the stuff we’ve seen…done better. Using the volume button for a camera? Yep. There was an app for that. Notification Center? Hi there, Android fans. Deep Twitter integration? Most of that has been in Android app hooks for quite some time.
The bare fact is that Apple’s innovation in the mobile is the piece of glass and metal in your hand, not necessarily the operating system that runs on it. And you know what? That’s exactly what you want.
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Apple stopped innovating with the iPhone. You’re welcome. - Apple
Brad’s analysis is pretty astute, if not entirely surprising. iOS 5 is not innovative in the strictly original sense. None of the major features are totally new ideas. The innovation is all in the details and the near perfect user experience (for most of us anyway).
What I find particularly odd though is how disingenuous many of the Android proponents are; saying Apple is just copying them — and implicitly that Android is better because they did it first.
I’ll grant any Android fan that their platform of choice has been doing this or that feature for ages (in phone years) and it most likely does them really well.
The thing is that, with the exception of Twitter OS integration (Twitter not really existing at the time), multitasking gestures (single-touch screens) and the location based notifications, every single feature on Apple’s hit list existed six years ago on my Windows Mobile.
It didn’t do any of it well and it didn’t do many of the features mentioned out of the box, but the original ideas started there (and likely on Palm) — not on Android.
Credit where credit’s due.
If you’re looking for significant and original innovation in phone operating systems right now the only place you’ll find it is on Windows Phone 7. Everything else has been me too and refinements since iOS 2. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
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christopherdwhite posted this
