Woz: iPhone – Best Overall Smartphone, But Android Has Leapt Ahead in Some Areas

Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak in an interview with Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) compared Google's Android with Apple's iPhone. He also spoke about the issue with Siri and iPhone 4S battery issues.

Here are some of the highlights from that interview:

• Woz thinks Apple’s iPhone is the best overall smartphone, but he says there are ways in which Android has leapt ahead of Apple. “My primary phone is the iPhone,” Woz says. “I love the beauty of it. But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do.”
• Woz says voice commands work better on Android. Android’s built-in navigation system, where the phone acts like a GPS system, is another advantage, he says.
• Android phones aren’t as simple to use as the iPhone, but they’re not that much more complicated, and “if you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little bit, well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways,” Woz says.
• Woz says he’s been using Siri for a long time and used to love it when it was an independent application created for the iPhone. But ever since Apple bought Siri and built the software into the iPhone 4S, it doesn’t work as well as it used to.
• With the iPhone 4 I could press a button and call my wife. Now on the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet.’”
• “I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android, and that bothers me,” Woz says. “I’ll be saying, over and over again in my car, ‘Call the Lark Creek Steak House,’ and I can’t get it done. Then I pick up my Android, say the same thing, and it’s done. Plus I get navigation. Android is way ahead on that.”
• “With the iPhone, something happened with the new OS or the new phone, and it just started running through the battery so fast,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of issues with things I have to turn off just to save the battery life.”

But despite all the criticism Woz still recommends Apple's iPhone over a Android-based smartphone:

“The people I recommend the iPhone 4S for are the ones who are already in the Mac world, because it’s so compatible, and people who are just scared of computers altogether and don’t want to use them. The iPhone is the least frightening thing. For that kind of person who is scared of complexity, well, here’s a phone that is simple to use and does what you need it to do,”

[source The Daily Beast]