I quite fancy some Gingerbread

I’m very tempted by Gingerbread.

Apple has treated me well in the past three years by providing me with hardware I love and an OS that delivers almost everything I want. But my needs have changed and the differences in iOS4.2 just don’t cut it.

I’m envious of the Notifications system in Android. The iPhone one doesn’t really cut it at all – layering the messages one on top of the other means you have to deal with each one of them as they come, latest first. And the dialogs are modal. It’s frankly terrible.

I’m envious of the Lock Screen system in Android. I want to be able to populate that with some more widgets, a little more information, data about my notifications or my incoming messages, status updates from online services, news items from my favourite feeds.

I’m envious of the Home Screens. They’re a bit more configurable – widgets really make a difference. I’m not saying that I want lots of them, just some would be nice. I’d like to be able to choose the size of my icons. I’d like icons to be live beyond the simple badges.

I realise there are other limitations. I realise that Android is still not as polished or as consistent as iOS, but there are some features which are painfully missing from iOS.