Popular apps highlight the difference between Android and iPhone

Two of the most popular iPhone apps, Pandora and Facebook, have finally been brought to the Android platform. These apps place increased emphasis on one of Android's strengths that really makes the user experience different from the iPhone: homescreen presence.

Last week, Apple rolled out Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone which improved upon the previous app by adding new features such as Facebook Events and direct-to-Facebook video uploading. It was received with great praise by the iPhone crowd.

Yesterday, the official Facebook app created jointly by Facebook and Google was released to the Android Market. While the Android app lacks many, if not most, of the features that the iPhone app has, it benefits from Android's ability to run apps in the background and really shines as a homescreen widget and Facebook Contacts live folder.

The widget is a simple blank field for updating your status with a scrollable field beneath it showing your friends' latest status updates, which updates on its own. The live folder, though not flashy, is 100% pure function. It creates a new contact list based upon your Facebook friends who have their phone numbers included in their profile, it organizes the contacts alphabetically alongside their profile picture, and with a press of the contact name, it pulls up their numbers in the Android dialer. It's extremely handy.

Pandora widget on Android

Today, Pandora released version 1.0 of its official Android app. While nearly identical to the extremely popular iPhone app, Pandora really capitalizes on Android's ability to run applications in the background and lets the user exit the full-screen Pandora app and return to the home screen where a medium-sized widget can be used to control the flow of music and rate songs. The only drawback of the widget is that it must drop into the full app to change stations; but even then, it is nearly identical to the iPhone, so the overall experience is only improved by the widget.

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