This is sort of blowing my mind. After the release of the iPhone, Android shifted from a trackball-based design to a touch-based design (which is a big shift), and copied the Apple homescreen for its app drawer layout, but to call it a "slavish copy" is disingenuous. Android diverges - and innovates - in a lot of very significant ways. Google has been offering voice search/commands/voice-to-text for Android long before Siri. It did notifications and task switching far better than iOS did (and iOS has now "slavishly" copied those concepts). The back button and activity stack make the device usage behaviors ridiculously different from iOS usage. It's been doing wireless sync and cloud-based stuff for a long while; Apple's just now starting to integrate that stuff.
iOS has better-looking stock art assets/widgets, and the application approval process guarantees an adherence to Apple's UI design policies, which does help produce a more consistent experience for the things that Apple cares about, but to me personally, iOS feels like a toy next to Android. As non-fanboyishly as I can say it, I genuinely believe Android is better software than iOS. Apple has the vertical integration down better, no doubt, and their marketing is about a thousand times better than anything that any of the Android handset makers are doing, but I don't think you can use both OSes and seriously dismiss Android as a cheap carbon copy.
There are admittedly plenty of operations that touch phones have that can't be done any other way, but silly things like sliding left/right as iOS does is a perfect example. WP7 slides up/down. The reason it slides left/right is because Google copied the widget layout.
If you didn't know, this is what Android looked like before they copied iOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
Doesn't look like Android at all does it? Then 1 year later, ta-da!
Yup. Before the iPhone, phone features fell into four categories:
1. I can figure out how to use this on my own.
2. I need to read the manual to figure this out, but I'll probably remember enough to be able to do it without the manual after that.
3. I can make this work if I have the manual with me, but probably will never be able to use it well without the manual.
4. I can't figure this out, and the manual makes no damn sense.
On many phones, even telephone features like conference calling where in #2 or #3.
With the iPhone, most things were in #1, including calling features like conference calling. Forget about the smart phone features--the iPhone was my first cell phone where I could actually use all the telephone features.
Going back to pre-iPhone phones would be as painful as giving up my calculator for a slide rule, or giving up vim for ed.
Post iPhone, you flick the hardware switch that you can reach while the phone is still in your pocket.
Apple changed a lot of things with the iPhone, but let's not get into revisionist history.
All the phones had some sort of way to get into quiet mode. Apple did it right, no-one else had.
There's a vast gulf between volume controls and a tactile feedback of 'is my iPhone on silent, [move thumb over toggle], yes it is, brilliant'.
And that was the genius of Apple. But not just there on all parts of the phone.
Just preordered my 4S to replace it. I admit I was a bit disappointed--I prefer the rounded back so I'd hoped for a case redesign. Even at this much of an upgrade [I don't have video, haven't been able to upgrade iOS in six months], I don't expect the "magic phone" feeling I had with the 3G. Far fewer people had smartphones at that time (May 09). Always startled me when my phone would create a stir. Now I get more of "wait, how old is your phone anyway?"
On the TouchPad that's like 5 seconds to change both.
(I understand I'm comparing a tablet to a phone but I never tried any other mobile OS so I have no idea how quick you can do that. I can guess it's like the TouchPad though.)
You want to know what it is?
Firstly the difference between the iPhone and any phone when it came out was phenomenal. It was 3-5 years ahead of any other phone. I am not exaggerating at all. It was incredible, a true game changer.
That Google managed to change Android's direction and produce a touch phone OS so quickly was an impressive feat and also showed how switched on whoever was running that project was. On the other hand calling it an homage to the iOS is being very generous. I was always surprised that Apple didn't go after them straight away with copyright it was that much of a ripoff.
The iPhone was ahead in every degree. The UI was awesome where every other phone was awful. It had a touch screen, no other mainstream phone had one. There were a lot of other details that were amazing at the time but have now faded into the recesses of my brain. And it looked incredible. All other phones looked like they'd been designed by Homer compared to the iPhone.
The difference between todays iPhone and all the others are pretty much the same but with less pronounced effects. There's a good reason Apple are suing Samsung over the design of their phone. No phones looked like that before the iPhone, it is a rip-off, we've just got used to all phone being iPhone clones, getting as close to ripping off Apple as they can without getting sued.
As for iOS vs Android? The UI is better. Not a little bit. A lot. It's smooth, it's thought out, it's a joy to use. Android pretty much copied the entire interface and still it's nowhere near as good. It's just not got the Apple attention to detail. The MS phone 7 one is the only other genuinely innovative product out there.
I'm not even a fan boy. I like Google most of the time. I respect the skill with which they brought out Android. It's still a knock off and you get what you pay for, knock offs are lower quality. They're not innovators, they're copiers and copies don't outshine originals. Apple have vision while Android just slavishly copies them. Siri is a perfect example of this. They didn't make it but as soon as they saw it they knew it was what they wanted, where they wanted to take it.
It's the only apple tech I own, but I'm sticking with iPhones for now. They rock.