Whats the big deal about Android?
This post was published 1 year 2 months 24 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.As I sit looking at the feeds this fine Saturday morning I am simply stunned about the level of coverage Android is getting.
All this coverage stems from the leaked video that surfaced online showing Android running on a T-Mobile HTC dream.
Now, I don’t know about you but using a Linux based OS on a mobile phone is dreadful. Most open source projects are wonderful, but they all suffer from one flaw. People trying too hard. When you have a team of extremely talented engineers working on a common goal sometimes the objective gets lost. Think of the adage, If you try to design a horse by committee don’t be shocked if you end up with a camel.
The Android OS is muddled by too many features. It is not designed for the common user. Look at the Blackberry, Palm and iPhone OS (Mind you I left WinMo out). You KNOW that all the previous mentioned OSes are designed for the for the “average” user. Blackberry with their click wheel enabled OS, Apple with their instance on eye candy and no background processes. Palm with their extremely familiar UI. The Android just leaves me uninspired and unimpressed.
Now these might be words I eat later down the road, but the Android alliance is a coalition of second stringers. Again, look at Apple, Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Motorola. These are all companies working solo and leading the industry, and with the exception of Apple available on almost every mobile carrier in the world. Now if you look at the Android alliance you have Verizon, and AT&T absent – the TWO largest phone networks in the US. HTC is a nice hardware manufacturer but if Google wants to win the mobile war, they need to make their own hardware and get out of this coalition of the weak.
Here is the formula. Steal a bunch of UI designers from Apple. Hide the geeky Linux Stuff. Buy Palm for the hardware (Hey the have the guy behind the Sidekick and iPod working there) and use them to manufacture your own devices. Make insane deals with the cellphone carriers, they are fueled by their unquenchable thirst for money and coincidentally you are sitting on a pile of it. Being secret only works for Apple, embrace the user show them you care. If all else fails become your own MVNO. Buy wholesale minutes for AT&T in the US make your phone available for a VERY low cost (Say $99 as shown by the success by the Centro) and give the service away for free. Enable your phone with GPS and bombard the user with ads. Repeat elsewhere in the world.
But in all honesty, the Android OS is going to be another one of Google’s pipe dreams. They came to the party too late.
I can’t really believe any of what you’re saying because you’re such a blatant fanboy of Apple and Google hater. If you look at it Android is getting as much, probably even less, coverage as the iPhone was getting. It is just as “revolutionary” as the iPhone is/was because it is pushing cell phone manufacturers to do something new and different.
Android. I WANT to believe.
I think there is more innovation a Windows Mobile then in Android.
It is yet another disturbing force in the cellphone industry.
Again Matt, I would love to eat my words.
Android is gonna be the shit… be patient young Jedi’s. I doubt your average user is gonna give a shit honestly… people bought the iphone because it’s pretty pretty flashy flashy… it’s a status symbol for your average user. If users cared about actual functionality and stability in a phone we’d all be carrying blackberries (bitch all you want… I don’t care). Android however will be picked up undoubtedly and become more main stream… sure you’re not going to see Jon Mayer sing about it during a SNL commercial break… the PR isn’t there, but it doesn’t need to be… how many GMail commercials did you see during the super bowl?
What it boils down to is Android is backed by a massive company capable of dumping billions of dollars into it’s development and growth… it’s licensed under the Apache, and GNU licensing… meaning A. it’s free (as in speech) B. it’s distributable by a third party or strict 3rd party license … meaning you could have Android Nokia… or Android Motorola… Android Palm even. This gives great flexibility but standards and concise project management (Google runs shit at the core loosely … think Linus to the Linux kernal). Now you have a platform backed by a bunch of money with the freedom to do whatever you wish. Sounds like a nightmare right… will never work…. just like Ubuntu… ohhh wait.
The fact that it’s built on Linux alone is enough to make me swoon over it. Instantly with a little portability changes you have millions of potential apps and functionality just waiting to be unleashed.
Bottom line… they’re late, just like Apple was… Android is going to be what powers the iPhone killer… if I’m wrong you can point and laugh… give if 3 – 5 years and see who the dominate cell phone OS is in the market.
If you recall Google was late to the search engine game… askjeeves, yahoo, msn, dogpile, altavista… they were all top dogs before our little Google pals came up with a great idea and decent algorithm.
Android may be interesting some people, but it will never be a UI winner. It’s impossible to design apps of any kind for a device with major variables in the UI. Screen size: unknown. Touchscreen: some devices will have it, some won’t. Hard buttons: some devices will have some, some won’t, and they’ll all be different anyway. It’s going to be a UI joke. You simply can’t beat a closed platform with a known hardware standard for creating an great UI. As far as cool apps, especially things that uncle Apple won’t allow — Android has the advantage there. But for average users, well, they won’t care since the usability will be a nightmare.
As for the huge consortium of companies behind this… Doesn’t matter. Can you name one consortium of companies that has ever produced anything useful? You create a consortium when you’re getting beat by another company and you can’t catch up. So you band together and create a huge bureaucratic committee of you and the other failed competitors who can’t keep up. Design by committee? Yeah right. That’s going to work well.
I couldn’t disagree more. For starters, there are tons of open source projects that don’t suck. Firefox, is an obvious example.
Secondly, Android phones don’t need to be at the top of the cellphone food chain to make a difference. I’d expect iPhone, Blackberry and some various WiMo phones to dominate the high-end for a while, but low and midrange phones will get eaten up by Andriod. Think about it: the cell phone manufacturers are spending lots of money right now either developing the OSes for these phones or buying the OS from one of a handful of companies. Having a shared, open OS will mean their development costs will be dramatically reduced. And the features that andriod will support will be vastly superior to the low/mid range phones out there. The bar is going to be drastically raised as to what normal, everyday people expect from their phones.
Whether or not Android succeeds in the high-end market will depend much more on the cell phone manufacturers being able to design sexy and functional phones as much as Android being good software. I’m not worried about iPhone being able to compete at all. Steve has some tricks up his sleeve, I am sure. But between Android and iPhone, all the other manufacturers had better start competing!
looking pretty solid to me ;)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080819-robotripping-hands-on-with-the-android-sdk-beta.html
@Matt – I completely agree.
Now as a preface, i’ve been a long time reader of uneasy. Long as in when you guys FIRST started posting, but over the past year it’s been almostd epressing watching this site degenerate… Either every article is a plainly biased apple fanboi article or it’s just filler. Sorry guys, you’ve lost a reader *unsubscribed*
@emory
I agree with you. I used to come here and read some quality stuff, but now it seems like a personal blog where they post their bias towards a product, or even ask if a certain service is offline. That would be a post for a forum, not a blog entry. I rarely come here anymore, another reader lost.
@emory and @thecheeks: Agreed. It seems to have coincided with the new theme, but I could be wrong. But yes, I come here less and less due to the inconsistent posting, filler posts, personal opinion posts, and so on. Just looking at the tags/categories at the bottom of the page, you can see that “Random,” “Cool,” and “Stupid” are members of the Top 5. If I wanted random, cool, and stupid, I’d go to Digg…. which I don’t.
Agreed with the last 3 people fully. I started coming to UNEASY regularly a little over a year and a half ago, maybe more actually, and it just has changed so much.
I will give Dan one thing, he’s not a total jackass tool like Mike Arrington.
If anything, I enjoy the smart readers/comments if the UNEASY article doesn’t tell me what I want to know.
@Larry And I go to Digg for the smart ass comments.