Ford vs. Chevy. Cowboys vs. Steelers. Democrats vs. Republicans.
All timeless rivalries that everyone has heard of, and gets tired of hearing about.
But the race car fans, football fanatics and political ideologues, in all their arguing over which is faster, has better statistics, or dictates how and where people communicate with each other, don't come close to those Geeks who have taken sides in the Apple iOS vs. Android fight for mobile operating system supremacy.
I'm not sure why people become so emotionally attached to their preferred brand of gadget...to the point where they are actually offended if someone points out that it lacks this, or doesn't do that. If you delve into any mobile tech forum, you can't go a page without posts where someone is laughing out loud about the iPad and it's lack of Flash support, and a reply post under it where an iPad user is laughing out louder because neither does Xoom. A Samsung Galaxy S user will point out the lack of reception bars on an iPhone4 status bar, and iPhone4 owner will respond with a youtube link showing video of their old iPhone 3G running Android and how it got froyo before the Samsung Galaxy S user did. Android fans seem to be more concerned with device features, slots, ports and numbers, while iOS users are more about UX, and what an iDevice actually does and the way it does it.
But there is another species of geek that finds a way to take advantage of all the animosity. Application developers are distributing their code to The AppStore and The Marketplace, with a dedication to making their product standard across operating systems, so it looks, functions and gives both users an identical experience, produces a result in an identical format and gives quality support to both users, post installation.
Ookla, the devs of the speedtest.net application, released v2.0 on the 18th for android users, which now looks and functions just like the iOS version that has been out for a few months.
Basically, the application tests latency, download throughput, and upload throughput,
records the metrics, tags them with GPS data, time and date, and type of connection, the location of the server hosting the session
...in a slick interface with a touch of eye candy. Multiple tests result in a sortable log that can be exported to a .csv file,
and emailed with a link to a graphic hosted on their results server for comparison.
I've drilled into the iOS file system to see if I could manipulate a file that stores the values in the log, finding only a database file with charvalues that I'm assuming are filled at the back end. (So to the android user reading this that will hate and question the outcome...all results that I post are actual)
Since the app is free for both iOS and Android, and since the app seems to have congruency across both operating systems, I thought this would be a great opportunity to compare the results between my iPhone 4, on ATT, and some of my friends and family who are on various android devices on Verizon.
Because the voice quality of ATT is poor (allegedly) I decided to send an email, which makes sense because they don't have SVDO, (allegedly) and ask for their results.
I got some great participation from family, and also some friends that responded to my Facebook solicitation:
Here are my results. I will produce screen caps as well as the ookla link just to show how it looks on an iphone4:
Another cool thing is you can take the GPS coordinates and put them in Maps and get a visual of where the test was executed:
Finally, here is a cap of the jpg file that the link in the email will point to:
As you will notice, there is a small delta in the what the app is showing and what the linked jpg shows...probably because the server records the highest point of amplitude, where ever that point is hit during execution, and the app takes the value at the trailing edge of the analysis.
I'll have the android results up shortly.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
