There’s quite a large difference between the overall UI experience between iPhone and Android. iPhone is more of an icon orientated UI where there are no widgets or on-screen applets that give the WOW feature to look at, vs Android that does have this. I decided to take a comparison look at iPhone vs Android home screens.
Below is the iPhone home screens, you can see how symmetric the iPhone UI is, every icon is in it’s own place holder, 4×4 layout plus the bottom 4 icons that remain consistent across all screens. It’s a very clean interface and most iPhone users like this, but it can sometimes become rather too rigid in it’s design.
Here are the Android home screens from the Samsung Galaxy S running Android OS 2.1 (Eclair). You can immediately see the difference, although you still have the ability like the iPhone to do a 4×4 layout with 4 buttons that are consistent at the base o the screen, you also have widget control, so you can add any widget application that takes up a space on the desktop home screens. You can add all kinds of widgets like Twitter status update applets, Facebook status updates, clocks, weather and much more. You can also add other features like ability to turn off Bluetooth, GPS , WiFi etc which is a very nice feature to have as a quick launch button to take you into settings.
I like the cleanness of the iPhone, but I also like the customisations you can make on the Android platform. Ultimately it’s good to put the control in the users hands, so if I want the clean looking iPhone display on an Android, I can do it. On the iPhone if I want an unclean look and want some widget support, I can’t unless I jailbreak it which of course is frowned upon by Apple and invalidates your warranty.
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