Saw an interesting bit from Jason Kincaid on Daring Fireball today regarding his disappointment with the iPhone 4 announcement from the perspective of an Android user. Having been playing with a Nexus One for the past couple of weeks, I can sort of see where he’s coming from, but I think he may be focusing too much on the hardware and not enough on the OS simply because iOS 4 itself has become old news by comparison.

I picked up a Nexus One about two weeks ago and have been using it almost exclusively as my primary phone for the past two weeks, mostly out of curiosity. I was even toting it at the WWDC Keynote on Monday (although my 3GS was still in my backpack, ready to go at a moment’s notice, and I had even toted along my first-generation iPhone for visual comparison purposes). I expect to do a more detailed comparison once Froyo and iOS 4 are fully out in the wild, but even from what I’m seeing at this point, Apple and Google have a lot to learn from each other.

To the point, however, Gruber expresses the opinion that many Android users may be hoping to see Apple play catch-up to Android, but that Apple doesn’t necessarily see that iOS needs to be more like Android. Overall, I agree with that sentiment, but I also think that when you look at the iOS 4 announcement from early April, Apple has not only caught up with Android in many of the areas that really count, but has actually done better.

I think anybody who has followed Apple over the past few years realizes that Apple doesn’t add major features until they feel that they’ve done them right. Apple is a company dominated by designers — people who are totally obsessed (mostly in a good way, IMHO), with how things work and not what they do. Google in many ways is the antithesis of Apple: A company dominated by engineers who take almost the completely opposite approach. For examples of this I don’t think we need to look any further than two of the longest-awaited features in the iPhone world: Copy-and-paste and Multitasking.

The lack of copy-and-paste on the original iPhone became a punchline in certain corners of the tech world. Savvy smartphone users from other platforms (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc) couldn’t believe that such a “basic” feature had been left out. Many pundits hailed this as an example of how the iPhone would never be a true contender. However, two important things happened:

  1. Most people didn’t care — they bought the iPhone anyway. To a user of an average “dumbphone” the iPhone was a brilliant, revolutionary device, and people who never had a feature before didn’t really know (or care) what they were missing. Keep in mind that prior to June 2007 non-smartphone devices made up around 95% of the marketplace. Which market segment do you really think Apple was more interested in?
  2. Apple eventually did add it, two years later. When they did, it was the most brilliantly intuitive implementation of copy-and-paste to ever hit a mobile device. Seriously. In a discussion with an Android-toting colleague yesterday, I mentioned that copy-and-paste on the Android was a mess compared to the iOS way of doing it. When he balked at that and asked “how much simpler could it be?” I handed him my iPhone with a text screen open. The only clue I gave him was “tap-and-hold on something.” He figured it out in about 3 seconds and walked away extremely impressed. No trackballs or keyboard shortcuts, no pop-up menus that get in the way of the text you’re reading — just tap-and-hold.

This year’s highly-anticipated feature? Background multitasking for third-party apps. Sure, everybody else has been doing this already, but Apple is once again taking their usual, controlled approach — giving most users what they actually need out of multitasking, rather than just opening the floodgates to a free-for-all where apps can do as they please. Android takes the free-for-all approach to the world of multitasking, and users end up paying for this in terms of performance and battery life — the Nexus One provides a wonderful graph in its settings of what is actually draining your battery, and it’s not uncommon to see apps that perform background sync and location services taking up far more than their fair share. Leaving something as simple as a task management app, Remember The Milk, running on my Nexus One with GPS location turned on cut my battery life down to a little over an hour, even though I wasn’t otherwise using the app.

Like their implementation of copy-and-paste, Apple’s multitasking solution promises to fix this by limiting what can actually run in the background and how long it can run for. Nothing will be able to actually start running by itself, and with the exception of apps that provide background audio, location, or VoIP services, nothing will be allowed to keep running for more than 10 minutes after the user closes it. Battery drain and performance from background audio apps should be no different than using the built-in iPod app that’s been there since the original iPhone, and Apple has taken steps to ensure that VoIP and background location apps only run within certain parameters — hopefully with consideration for battery life (at the initial iOS 4 announcement in April Scott Forstall explained that most background location apps would use cellular triangulation rather than keeping the GPS on all the time in order to save power).

So, like copy-and-paste, iOS 4 may be bringing multitasking late in the game, but it will be playing the right game.