Battle of the Mobile OS's: Ice Cream Sandwich vs. iOS 5

Now that Google has finally announced its next generation operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.0, we can now thoroughly compare Google's offering to Apple's iOS 5. Here we'll compare a few major features and a couple of small ones.

One of the features that got overhauled greatley in both iOS 5 and ICS was the notifications. iOS 5 borrowed heavily from Android 2.3 gingerbread in its notification center, but added the typical Apple polish to it, allowing users to also see weather and stocks in the notification center. ICS's notifications remain mostly unchanged, though it does add the option to get rid of notifications one by one. One area where Android was completely modified, and iOS remained unchanged was multitasking. ICS still multitasks in the same way as its predecessor, but the method of accessing running apps is different. Where as gingerbread acessed running applications using a long press the home key, ice cream sandwich accesses it using a software button that pulls up a list of screenshots showing applications in their present state. An interesting tidbit is that Google developed an entirely new font called Roboto that is optimized for viewing on a mobile device. Google promises that the voice control application for android will be.completely overhauled for 4.0, though it still won't work nearly as well as Siri, or as naturally.


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