iOS 4.2 - the Android tablet obliterator?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 18 November 2010 16:00

Your IT - Mobility

With Android tablets thus far proving to be far less polished than Apple's iOS experience, which itself will shortly be massively upgraded with iOS 4.2's capabilities, iOS 4.2 is Apple's weapon against the advance-party of Android attack tablets.

If there's one thing that's consistent from the reviews of competing tablets to Apple's iPad, it's that virtually all reviews of Android tablets happily and readily acknowledge the iPad's superiority.

Sure, there's the iPad's current lack of multitasking, which Android tablets already have had baked in for some time, but iOS 4.2 will fix that, even if in Apple's more limited manner.

Still, Apple's 'limitations' mean that end-users actually have battery life left over to keep on computing, whereas Android users are reaching for their rechargers that much more often, while Apple users will at last, when iOS 4.2 finally launches, have much more multitasking capability than before - while still having the majority of battery life preserved.

When it comes to organisation of apps on screen, Android might have various screens, just as iOS offers, but built-in folders and their ultra-ease of creation and management again puts iOS out in front. Apple's AirPlay and AirPrint are also killer features implemented with simplicity

Sure, Android OS 2.3 might match Apple in many more ways, but what's the good of Android OS 2.3 when your Android Tablet is stuck on OS 1.6, 2.1 or 2.2 with no word on exactly when your hardware will be compatible for the upgrade?

At least we all know that when Apple finally does launch iOS 4.2, with the Beatles clearly having been much more important to launch first, all iPads on the planet that are still working (unsmashed by baseball bats or other crazy stuff as we saw when iPads launched) will be able to upgrade to iOS 4.2 - no questions asked, no problems, and not even any charge.

Naturally, Google isn't charging for its OS updates either, and while there is concern Apple will charge existing iPad owners for any iOS 5.0 update, at least Apple quickly lets us know which devices are upgradeable and which are not, with the wait for an upgraded OS to be released (along with the inevitable wait for new hardware) the only waiting game Apple users need to play.

Not so with Android devices on the OS update front. In that world, one set of users in one country on one carrier can get an update, but users of the same phone on another carrier might still be waiting, or any number of similar situations where we've even seen Android updates released and then quickly withdrawn because of some showstopper of a bug that has need weeks more time to correct, as happened with the Samsung Galaxy S, which isn't even a 'tablet' but simply a smartphone, popular and successful though it is, with word of a dual-core Galaxy S upgrade also coming in 2011.

Continued on page two, please read on!