Hah, I knew I should've pulled the trigger on buying MonoTouch last week!
Oh well, at least I can do some testing on a real device without buying anything for the moment.
From looking at the comparison chart on https://store.xamarin.com/ , the LLVM optimising compiler only seems to be available for Business or above. What does this mean in practice?
It looks like this issue was caused by Apple mistakenly marking the centre of Local Government Areas as 'cities', in Australia at least. See example at http://imgur.com/qlciM for an example from Perth; Cambridge and Vincent aren't suburbs, and the others are in the wrong spot (Joondalup CBD is on the wrong side of the freeway)
From my iiNet DSL2+ connection in Perth, Australia to tokyo1.linode.com, I get 204ms ping and 14 hops, and from a Telstra fibre connection, I get 174ms and 15 hops.
That compares to about 250ms and 12 hops on iiNet, and 210ms and 14 hops on Telstra to fremont1.linode.com.
"since Android was built for multitasking, inactive applications remain in a saved state for a particular amount of time." -- uhh, this is exactly how it works on iOS.
"This doesn’t need to be strictly implemented by the developer, it’s a core part of the OS" and "is also means that multitasking will only work for an app if the developer specifically implements it" -- completely wrong. Compile the app with the iOS 4 SDK and you get it all for free. Background services like audio and VoIP require developer work though.
"iOS still missed the mark. On the iPad, the notification bar is super awkward and doesn’t scale well." -- citation needed. I actually prefer the iOS 5 notifications, as when they come in they are more conspicuous than the Android system.
"And the backwards compatible version of iOS4 for iPhone 3G slowed down the phone so much that users wanted to throw their phones out" -- 4.0 was a bit pants, but that was fixed pretty quickly, and worked reasonably well. And at least Apple actually provide updates to their older phones, unlike most Android OEM's.
"Even things like voice-chat were available on Android devices before the iPhone 4 was even announced" -- pretty sure the iPhone 1 could make voice calls.