Alexis said:
I'm thinking of getting a Tablet/iTouch/iPad, and want to buy something that will have a long Pleco life. Which is the best long term bet in order to keep current with Pleco dictionaries and features? iOS 5 or Android 4, or wait for a new release of one of these?
iOS. That's not even a Pleco thing, just a general OS update thing - Apple has been very diligent about promptly updating all of their devices and keeping them updated generally for at least 2 years after release - original iPhone came out 2007 and had its last update with iOS 3 (released in 2009), iPhone 3G came out 2008 and was kept current through iOS 4 (2010), iPhone 3GS came out 2009 and is still current with 2011's iOS 5 (but will probably not support iOS 6)... no iPad yet is old enough to test this, but it seems very likely that Apple will give the original iPad (released in 2010) iOS 6 at least. (though the lack of RAM will be a bit of a challenge, just as it was when they upgraded the iPhone 3G to OS 4) Meanwhile, if you buy an Android 4.0 device today, it's far from certain that it will even be upgradable to Android 5.0 (expected next fall), let alone Android 6.0.
We're generally pretty conservative in terms of platform requirements for our core product - Pleco 2.2.11 still runs on iOS 3, it's only in 2.3 that we'll be starting to require iOS 4, and our Android software requires the also-released-in-2010 Android 2.2 - so a device you buy now should be able to at least run the latest version of Pleco for a while even without any OS updates, but some new features may require the latest OS.
