“We Had It First!”

iOS 5's new notification system - an Android ripoff, some say

“WiFi sync to iTunes? You mean, like my Android phone does already?”

“Sounds like what my Samsung Galaxy S II does… ”

Just a couple of the comments I received when talking about the new features of iOS 5.

Now, before I bring out my next statement, I feel I need to make a disclaimer. The people who said the above know who they are, and, while they may be wonderful people otherwise (and I’m not going to hold it against them personally), the following still stands:

Android trolls are the worst kind of trolls.

Say, next year, you were to buy a new smartphone. What would your criteria be? You, as a typically tech-savvy reader of this blog, may have a number of ‘killer’, must-have features on your hypothetical checklist. You may decide you want the aforementioned WiFi syncing. You may want an elegant notifications system; you may want a BBM/WhatsApp style service to use instead of texting where possible.

When you look at what’s on the market, you’re going to see essentially four choices of operating system (unless MeeGo takes off drastically in the next year, I suppose): BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone Mango, and of course iOS 5.

You’re going to look at these phones and weigh up what they have to offer. All the pros and cons of each OS, from the flexibility of Android to the tiles system of Windows Phone’s Metro UI. Perhaps you own a compatible machine or tablet that’s going to sway your decision towards a smartphone; perhaps you’re in love with WP7′s smooth menu animations. But at no point are you going to buy a Droid over an iPhone, for example, based solely on the fact that iOS 5′s notifications are “Android-style” and Android had them first. The feature is there for both operating systems, and whether one OS had the feature years before the other becomes, for all intents and purposes, a moot point.

So, my answer to you many who tweeted me, saying Android is better because it’s had some form of wireless syncing for some time now, or BlackBerries are better because they started BBM and Apple are just copying them, is: “Grow up.” Or do you want me to go back to 1984 and say that Apple is better because they had a GUI system first and Microsoft copied them? Is that going to sway your mind on whether you’ll buy a Mac or a Windows PC too, then?