Android vs. Symbian Revisited

Android vs. Sym­bian Round 2

Almost a year ago, I posted the arti­cle Mobile Phone OS Bat­tle: Sym­bian vs Android. Android has evolved pretty fast and some of the points I had on that post have become null and void. Back then, there was a lot of hype sur­round­ing Android devices. There were rel­a­tively few out there. That’s now changed and sim­ply hav­ing some old ver­sion of Android is not going to be wel­comed at all — quite the contrary.

Sym­bian has been rejected by some of its biggest advo­cates, Sam­sung and Sony Eric­s­son. For the time being it’s just a Nokia affair. Given the size of Nokia, that’s not such a hor­rific thing but in gen­eral things are not look­ing very good. They’ve even been rumours of a pos­si­ble Android or Win­dows Phone 7 move for Nokia, but so far that’s all they’ve been, rumours.

Before, there wasn’t a lot of inno­va­tion in Android, but as giants like Sam­sung, Sony Eric­s­son and Motorola start get­ting more seri­ous with the plat­form, we’re start­ing to see a bucket loads of it. Just look at the Motorola Atrix for instance — the pin­na­cle of mobile inno­va­tion right now and it’s an Android phone. I will write an arti­cle about that beast soon.

Android has evolved to a point where stock Android is not so bad any­more; in fact it is desired. Still on desire, my HTC Desire HD has the Sense UI on top of Android 2.2.1 and in my opin­ion it’s the best way to expe­ri­ence Android. As for Sym­bian, there’s really not much to say. It’s a Nokia only affair and they’ve done a fair bit to keep it up to par. The gallery is improved, there’s multi-touch sup­port and that works pretty well etc. As a fol­low up to my last arti­cle, the Sym­bian UI lacks emo­tion. That’s what’s wrong with it. It has more raw power than many devices out there but no heart, no con­sis­tency, not many ani­ma­tions and lag. That amounts to a bad user experience.

The N8 and other phones on Symbian^3 (or just Sym­bian) are packed with fea­tures and that’s OK for some peo­ple. In the long run, peo­ple like me who break away from Sym­bian don’t feel any­thing for the plat­form. I don’t miss it because Android has quickly and effi­ciently filled that void. Every­thing I could do on my Sym­bian phone, I can do on my Android phone — only it’s less painful because I get to see lit­tle uni­corns fly by as I do it. By “lit­tle uni­corns” I mean a more pleas­ant expe­ri­ence with more ani­ma­tions and beau­ti­ful graph­ics. Even then I’m still more attached to my iOS devices espe­cially my iPad because it’s just more pleas­ant to use and look at as it does its things.

Sym­bian was first to a lot of things, HD video record­ing, 12Mega pixel cam­eras, Blue­tooth 3.0 and all, but that doesn’t mean it will be the best at it. Look at cut, copy and paste imple­men­ta­tion on Android com­pared to Sym­bian. On my Desire HD, the expe­ri­ence is more intu­itive and con­sis­tent than ever — on par with the iOS imple­men­ta­tion only different.

Android frag­men­ta­tion is real and it’s still a prob­lem. Accord­ing to stats, only about 0.4% of Android devices(or just the Nexus S) have the lat­est ver­sion of Android (2.3). That’s insane. 51.8% of Android users are on ver­sion 2.2. Here  are the num­bers visualised.

Android Frag­men­ta­tion Visualised

The sit­u­a­tion is sort of dif­fer­ent for Sym­bian. Phones don’t grad­u­ate from one ver­sion of Sym­bian to another. If a device is on Symbian^1, it will die on Symbian^1. Updates are more sub­tle because the under­ly­ing soft­ware remains the same. Nokia has a great rep­u­ta­tion for keep­ing its devices up-to-date within their Sym­bian ver­sions. So frag­men­ta­tion isn’t really an issue in the Sym­bian camp.

We’re yet to see what kind of changes are com­ing in the big Sym­bian update; they bet­ter be good. The proces­sor speed and RAM of the N8 may prove to be the lim­it­ing fac­tor in pro­duc­ing a great emo­tional expe­ri­ence — they shouldn’t be though given the hard­ware in my first gen iPod Touch (128MB RAM, ~400MHz proces­sor, Open­GLES 1.0 sup­port). It’s pack­ing a lot of emotion.

I can’t really con­clude the bat­tle just yet. There will surely be another. The tables have turned. Android is bet­ter, for now, in terms of hard­ware vari­ety and user expe­ri­ence. Whether it will remain bet­ter is only a mat­ter of time. MWC is com­ing up and there is bound to be a shake up.