A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned. I'm not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it's released, as ever. It won't be as customizable - no Swype, no Facebook Home - but those remain relatively minor inferiorities. The new battlefront is different. The new battlefront is the cloud: Google Maps vs. Apple Maps, Siri vs. Google voice search, iCloud vs. Dropbox et al, and Google Now vs...well, nothing at all, yet. This is a big deal. As we grow accustomed to an always-online world of ubiquitous computing, your phone becomes less a device in and of itself and more a gateway to its cloud services. And it's very hard to argue that Apple is anything but the serious underdog here.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/gRBLqOod1rs/
