[OSM-talk] iPhone vs Android - OSM shootout

[andrzej zaborowski]

2009/11/23 Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic at gmail.com>:
> Things for consideration are:
> - onboard GPS precision
> - applications for GPS logging
> - applications for POI collection
> - battery life when mapping (how long can you map)
>
> Please share any experience that you have with any or even better if you
> had experience with both of them. I only user iPhone for a short while,
> and haven't even seen Android for real but I ran Android emulator via SDK
> to get a feel for it.
>
>
> Here are some of my thoughts...
>
> Android positive points:
> - platform on the uptake, more apps coming every day
> - nice POI collection app [1]
> - runs multiple apps at once
> - quite open platform
>
> Android negative points:
> - less apps than iPhone, both for OSM and general
> - not so good as multimedia player (video and audio podcasts)
> - a bit bigger and heavier than iPhone
>
>
> iPhone positive points:
> - lots of apps, both for OSM and general [2]
> - CloudMade MapZen POI collector supports for iPhone [3]
> - multitouch interface
> - great multimedia player (video and audio podcasts)
> - nice deal for a 2 year T-Mobile contract
>
> iPhone negative points:
> - runs only one app at once :(
> - pretty closed platform :(
> - quite expensive, no carrier in Croatia offers it in contract deals :(

If anyone has experience with any of the two and additionally the Palm
Pre, I'd love to see a comparison too, and especially if there are any
OSM related apps.  My experience with Pre so far:

 + very exact aided GPS
 - no un-aided GPS at all (until the protocol is reverse engineered)
 + pretty open OS (Linux based webOS, partially closed-source, but on
some accounts it's more transparent than Android since it's all
javascript)
 - none GPS related apps whatsoever, that I've seen (but a lot of
developer uptake)
 + multitouch, 3D graphics accel, accelerometers, etc etc

Cheers