Generally correct: iOS offers a few more services than just audio and VOIP, but it is a fixed list.
On the other hand, I've never seen an app on Android that sucked down battery life, and if it did, I'd uninstall it just like any other buggy app. I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.
To be fair, the reason that Android background apps don't drain the battery is because Google put a _huge_ amount of engineering into power management (witness the lkml flamewars about "wakelocks" as they try to merge this code back upstream).
Android also has the lovely screen showing which apps are burning the battery. In my experience, an _overwhelming_ fraction of power use is by the screen and the radio. (And by games running in the foreground, but that's to be expected.)
I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.
Yes, that's a red herring.
But there is indeed a real problem with the "real" multitasking that android implements: Responsiveness. This is one area that they absolutely need to work on urgently.
On the iPhone everything is near instant, or if you have to wait then there is clear indication that the phone is doing something.
On Android we get the familiar (but unwelcome) choppyness that we know from Desktop Operating Systems. Button presses will not always be recognized immediately (or sometimes not at all). Page transitions are not always smooth, often they are choppy or do outright freeze in the middle. It is very often not obvious that you have to wait; i.e. a button press will cause the UI to freeze momentarily but without giving you any feedback that your press was actually registered.
And ofcourse the unpredictable delays when opening or switching apps.
A multi-second delay before opening the phonebook or dialer is simply unacceptable for a phone.
This description actually makes it sound worse than it is. Despite these problems I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy overall. But they need to work on this stuff if they want the perception of android as "slow" and "choppy" to change. Because that's the first thing you notice when playing around with an android device in the store.
What are you talking about? I get the same choppiness on my iPhone 3G (with 3.1.2 and even worse on 4.0) that you get everywhere else. The iPhone is not free from choppiness unless your using the iPhone 4 only. Even 3GS users have choppiness problems on 4.0
To clarify, I was indeed referring to the iPhone 4.
Perhaps I should just have left the reference out altogether. Imho it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed regardless of the state on other platforms.
I've noticed the same problems on the Samsung Galaxy S phone I got from Sprint last Tuesday. It's the "Epic 4G" variant. I also have issues with camera and GPS apps freezing or crashing pretty frequently.
Yeah, it's really not much of a problem. Especially now that Google is working on their own push notification service there really shouldn't be a need for that many background services.
I love Android, I'm all in favor of the robust multitasking model, that having been said - StumbleUpon and PayPal do NOT need long running services in the background and they were both promptly uninstalled and ranked poorly because of that.
On the other hand, I've never seen an app on Android that sucked down battery life, and if it did, I'd uninstall it just like any other buggy app. I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.