The Analysis looked at over 1000 parameters to compare Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone in terms of usability and features in order to arrive at a winner.
You may also give your suggestions in comment section regarding this analysis taken by Digit.
How do you determine what makes a good OS? What makes iOS vs. Android or Windows Phone vs. BB10, or any other such comparison not just about the fanboyism? Is it even possible to arrive at a scientific conclusion to this question? If we look at entire eco-systems, Android and iOS are obvious choices for buyers because of the sheer amount of apps they have available. However, what’s that got to do with an answer to the question, what’s the best designed OS out of the box?
How they compared
So how do you go about “testing” or “comparing” OSes? For one, we couldn’t run benchmarks, because that’s a test of hardware running an OS and not really a test of the OS itself. What we really needed to do was to break down the functions of a mobile OS into components that highlight a particular use case and rate the ability of the OS on its ability to handle that task.
So how do we use our phones the most these days?
· ● Browsing to find content to read and research
· ● Good old email to communicate for work and personal reasons
· ● Messaging / texting people, obviously
· ● Customising our phones to be exactly as we want them to be, and thus we gave importance to settings and not just what was possible but how easy it was to find what we wanted
· ● Managing contacts and the dialler to call and keep in touch, link contacts, etc
· ● Photography, obviously, as we now click more pictures with smartphones than dedicated cameras, but not just clicking, sharing, editing, etc.
· ● Notifications, and being alerted and updated about what’s happening, and the control you get over what you're notified about
· ● The lock screen of our phones (which some claim will be the most important screen going forwards) as it’s the real summary of what’s happening as soon as we look at our phones
· ● Searching for things (on or off the phone), because we can't live without search these days, but more importance to on the phone searches.
· ● Videos that we capture, edit and then want to share with friends
Are these the only ways we use our phones? Of course not, some of us may find creative uses for phones, such as using them to read long Tolkien tales, or as a brick to throw at someone (shameless exaggeration), but we’re focusing on the rules here and not the exceptions. As those of you wondering about social media and “sharing”, don’t worry, absolutely every parameter or use case where you would want to “share” something, was looked at under each individual category. So, for example, you want to share a picture you just clicked on all your social media accounts, we’ve considered that under photography, etc.
Once we’d decided what we needed to look at (which basically covers over a thousand individual features or settings in each of the OSes), we then proceeded to segregate each and every setting / feature into one of the 10 categories mentioned above.
The Results
Android 4.4.4 (3rd Place)
In our minds, and, we’re quite sure, in most of your minds as well, Android was the winner even before we began testing. It seemed such a blindingly obvious winner, given that its plethora of apps and the thriving developer community. Unfortunately (for Android), this test is looking at the design of the OS rather than the popularity of the platform and in that regards, stock Android is surprisingly lacking. Perhaps it's a leave it to the apps philosophy, but out of the box it's a little underwhelming when compared to the competition.
Let’s consider universal search for example. One would expect an OS that’s being mentored by Google would have the best overall search experience of them all, but it’s just not as good as you would expect. Both iOS and BB10 do better than Android when it comes to search functionality (internal phone search) and beat it by a large margin. How large? Well, believe it or not, more than double Android’s score!
The default Android Search tool doesn’t search through SMS, calendar entries, E-mail and much more. Those who are used to Android probably won’t even notice it because you didn’t know that it was even possible, but for those migrating from other platforms, especially BlackBerry, this would be a glaring omission.
The same can be said for photography as well. The new “Android Camera” app is a huge disappointment and nowhere near as feature-rich, and in-effect, as functional, as the camera apps on other platforms, BlackBerry and Windows Phone included. Again, remember this is a comparison of the camera software, not hardware, so don't shoot off angry mails about how your camera clicks better photographs than any other platform.
What does it do right? For one thing, Android 4.4.4 features the most feature-rich mobile browser that we’ve had the pleasure of using. While it does lose out on something as convenient as Safari’s Reading List feature, it’s syncing features are incomparable; iOS does manage to come a close second though.
Something else that Android does well is customisability, which was to be expected, but there were issues here as well. Stock Android is simply not as customisable as one would expect. Simple things like customising your quick settings are just not present. You can, of course, just ignore stock Android and jump to CyanogenMod or some other such ROM, but the true customisability of ROMs such as that are something we’ll be looking into later.
Overall, Android manages a distant third, a full 8 points behind our winner and just barely 1.5 points ahead of Windows Phone in fourth.
iOS 7.1.2 (2nd Place)
To be completely honest, we’ve always respected Apple for what they’ve done with iOS as a platform, but the full extent of the work that they’ve put into the OS was largely ignored by many of us and we really didn’t expect the OS to fare as well as it did. The price for their phones in India kind of turns us off, truth be told.
The big shocker was notifications. iOS didn’t have real notifications a couple of iterations ago (iOS 5) and now all of a sudden we discover that it has the best implementation of a notification system across all platforms. It’s the subtle design decisions that make this possible, the indicator on the icons, location-specific reminders, the ability to allow repeated calls to notify you even when night-mode is enabled and so much more. None of the other OSes even came close to providing such a degree of information and customisability.
Interestingly, the default camera app in iOS is quite awful in terms of manual control. One might argue that the iPhone 5s has an amazing camera and that it probably doesn’t need as many fine-grained settings as the camera app on a rival, but as we've said before, this is about the OS and not the hardware. Plus, what happens when the same camera app is on a lower specced iPod Touch or older iPad? You might want some extra controls on those to tweak your pictures.
Search is another area where iOS shines and while it still isn’t as good as BlackBerry’s native search functionality, it was still more than enough to take the second place in our tests with a very healthy score of 75%. Way ahead of Android (35%) and just 10 points behind BB10 (85%).
iOS suffers badly in two departments – managing contacts and customisation. When it comes to contacts, the dialler is very basic and just seems to deal with contacts as an after-thought, unlike the more integrated approach used by just about every other mobile OS. Customisation is another sore point with this OS because it simply doesn’t let you change a lot of the default behaviour.
iOS manages to bag the second spot with its excellent notification system, good browser and excellent search functionality.
BlackBerry 10.2 (1st Place)
The underdog takes the crown. The BlackBerry 10.2 OS is undoubtedly the best designed mobile OS out of the box that’s currently available in the market. We were stunned by the result and to be honest, we delayed sending the magazine to print a day just to recheck everything. BlackBerry’s been behind the times for some time, if we're honest, and BB10 was supposed to be the game-changer. Quite frankly though, most people haven't given the OS much attention. While we’re not arguing the justification for that disdain, it’s quite clear that the OS deserves much more attention than it actually receives.
Now BlackBerry OS 10.2 (10.2.1.2977 for those who want specifics) has, by today’s standards, a very lacklustre browser – lacking even basic sync functionality, a messaging app (SMS) that’s also very basic, and that’s it. Those were the only real downsides to the OS. The browser itself is not terrible, and gets most things done, but with a whole range of other features being offered by the other platforms, somehow quick rendering and a reader mode don't make up the gap.
BlackBerry OS 10.2 boasts of the most feature-rich search engine, an e-mail and contact management system that’s second to none, and is also surprisingly more customisable than we thought it would be, and also offers a good photography and video capture experience.
The sheer functionality offered by the OS, out-of-the-box, just cannot be ignored. Once you complete the initial setup, the device is perfectly capable of performing just about any and every task you would expect from a phone, and then some.
Take the search functionality, it truly is a universal search. A function that scans every bit of data on your phone, including browser history, e-mail and SMS conversations and much more. No other OS in our test was capable of performing these actions. In effect, the search is so effective that BlackBerry OS 10.2 walks away with scores that indicate it to be more than twice as good as Android’s implementation. Only iOS managed to come even close to BB10’s performance in this department.
E-mail was another area where BlackBerry OS 10.2 outshone every other OS (we expected this one). However it was the margin of victory (a score of 83.2, which is a full 30 points ahead of Android’s gmail app) that surprised us a little. The reason for this massive performance difference lies in the way the OS deals with e-mail. While the others are content to leave e-mail management to an app, BlackBerry OS 10.2 integrates e-mail into the OS, making it as native to the platform as a dialler is to a phone. This lends the OS some distinct advantages, particularly when it comes to managing multiple accounts and search, courtesy of the “Hub”.
Anyone who’s used a BlackBerry device knows that it’s a device that places communication first and entertainment second, and that comes across very clearly in our tests. Entertainment options, which would include the browser, photography, etc., are functional components and powerful enough to not give the average user cause for complaint. At the same time, the communication modules are so well designed and integrated into the OS that they far outstrip the competition and place this OS as the clear leader out of the box.
Windows Phone 8.1 (4th Place)
Windows Phone placed last on our test and it’s actually a little difficult to pin-point the problem. The OS is not bad really, it does perform all the actions you would expect an OS to perform in the sense you can send and receive calls and SMS, manage e-mail and even includes a notification drawer with quick access settings.
The real problem, as far as we can judge is that the OS does everything that you expect it to, but it just doesn’t do those things as well or as efficiently as other OSes. It does handle contacts and messaging better than almost every other OS (excluding BB10) courtesy of its People Hub, but that’s the only thing we can really say about it.
In essence, Windows Phone needs more exclusivity and focus than People Hub to outshine the other three.
There’s more to come
What we’ve given you so far is just part one of this quest of comparing OSes and their variants. With refreshes of all of these OSes coming soon, new OSes such as Ubuntu Phone, and even newer Android variants such as on the Amazon Fire Phone, the OnePlus One, Xiaomi Mi 4 and so on there’s still loads of work to be done.
Score Sheet
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OS
|
Android 4.4.4
|
iOS 7.1.2
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BlackBerry 10.2
|
Windows Phone 8.1
| |
Browser
|
66.28
|
61.8
|
40
|
50.47
| |
E-mail
|
53.07
|
46.6
|
83.2
|
44.93
| |
Messaging
|
36.6
|
43.2
|
34.2
|
60.2
| |
Settings and Customisation
|
55.48
|
40.09
|
53.21
|
45.13
| |
Contacts and dialler
|
51.25
|
40.33
|
62.33
|
58.28
| |
Photography
|
43.9
|
47.24
|
55.13
|
54.05
| |
Notifications
|
29.4
|
69
|
36.7
|
29.2
| |
Lock Screen
|
55.8
|
51.2
|
48.78
|
37.2
| |
Search
|
35
|
75.3
|
85.3
|
54.7
| |
Video
|
32.72
|
38.6
|
46.76
|
22.56
| |
Final Overall Score
|
48.44
|
52.1
|
56.91
|
46.68
| |
You may also give your suggestions in comment section regarding this analysis taken by Digit.
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