Yes, the release of IOS 5 is just catching up to gingerbread so I am sure ICS will be taking Android to the next level.

But then new iPhone 4S has the Siri voice assistant which is a great thing, do you think Google can come with such a good feature

This is stupid. What makes things sell is Apps that do things useful. A *new* OS lends less than 5% of the overall functionality.

There are several hundred thousand Apps out there on all platforms. Very few stand out... by any way that you measure.

OK, but now every app exists on each platform: iOS, Android, WP7, Blackberry.
what is so special with iPhone that makes the iPhone 4S sells a million device on its launch day ?

it'll be tastier for sure!

@zoo But there are no ICS confirmed specs revealed yet, what are you expecting ?

If ics early unifies chrome OS and Android os then it should vote ios5 out of the water. Even still the ability to use chrome browser on smartphones would make me happy.

I like to think so but, sadly, it won't be enough. To really beat iOS, Android needs to change the perception of iOS users. Most of them don't even realize what Android has to offer, they just swallow everything Apple puts in front of them. I was watching yesterday a colleague updating his iPhone 4S to iOS5 and getting excited about the new features and I started pointing some things that Android has had for a while. Obviously, he had no idea.

@chipnsmoltz95 sure unifying Android and Chrome will be a hit, if this happens we can see Android notebooks

@Corneliu agree to that 100%, the problem is that Android vendors concentrate on the phone capabilities rather than the operating system itself

ICS and Android needs to better leverage its great advantage of being a (more or less) free and open platform. Growth, and overtaking Apple, will not come just from building better smart phones, it will come when the community starts to take advantage of Android/ICS (or whatever comes after ICS) to build other smart devices, all running a common OS and taking advantage of common communication, storage, and syncing architectures.

Imagine a simple scenario where all parking meters are running Android, both for communicating with the debit/credit card brokers, but also to be able to communicate with navigation software or trip planning software so that when you want to go downtown to pick up something you can also check to find the best times to go in order to get easy parking, or what is the closest parking that has open spots ... or millions of other useful things that can be accomplished with embedded systems everywhere.

The "Fruit Vendors" platform, being closed, has the disadvantage of requiring licensing in order to be used, even assuming they would want their OS embedded in devices they can't directly sell for incredible markups.

@NY totally agree with you we are expecting Google Wallet and NFC payment to be a standard, Android@Home and Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) and even Myriad Alien Dalvik which enables Android to be run on several devices, so I believe Android is going on the right path.

No... Slow adoption keeps most of the people using older version of android in any case. I mean, I got "state of art tablet" Galaxy Tab one year ago and the android version is still 2.3.3... Latest gingerbread is 2.3.7.

Honestly, Android biggest problems are not technical details. It's the fragmentation. This is difficult to solve by new version of OS itself

Android ICS may give tough competition to Apple IOS 5 in smart phone business !!!

@Aloitteleva I believe fragmentation applies to your Galaxy Tab, cause Android 2.3 is made for phones, then came Honeycomb for tablets. but ICS is supposed to be a unified system that runs on both tablets and phones, so it's supposed to solve the problem

@Mina That was just an example. Different vendors are bring new version with different timetables... For example, I still have 3.1 in motorola xoom while 3.2 has been out for a while now. What come to version 2.3 of Android... It took half year to update Tab from older version to 2.3 after it was released and at that point, i didn't care anymore.

The thing what I'm saying is that google is loosing power from launching, because they can't deliver latest version of OS at same day when they release it. Like apple is doing they release a software which is instantly available to everyone when ever the release is. In google case, they are not in control of that, it's up to vendors.

This affects also developer who would like to provide state-of-art software... They will use much older APIs as because new version of Android do not have big enough installation base.

I agree Android 4.0 is supposed to solve this kind of issues, but honestly i don't believe multiple companies can provide such a integrity as Apple does. This will be weak point of Android (or rather strength of apple). Google should have more control over Android's delivery to customers. More control over vendors might push them to use some other platform aswell. There still is options, the game just started...

offcourse android 4 will beat apple ios 5....no doubt abt that...!!!

Yes

Ofcourse, ICS will beat iOS 5 ..

Yummy. ofcourse

Well it will be a tough competition but android has chances to overcome it..

Yes!!!

Thanks for sharing

Yeah! As ICS will remove most fragmentation and has a much better design it will probably catch up!