Oct
Android, the next wave
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Phone companies have been kicking around wireless handsets for years. Everyone claiming that the future was wireless handset devices. Soon we won’t need our laptops anymore. We’ll have all the computing power, media and communication we need all in the palm of our hands. There are alot of technical challenges though that havn’t been overcome quite yet. Thus, no large group has bought into one particular mobile device. Not however, until the iPhone.
The Start
Apple iPhone built the first mobile device that has now become the standard to follow. Simple, aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, functional and much more. Through the years Apple has come up with many advances in technology, and yet hasn’t gained a long lasting hold on the larger percent of the market. Sure, there are alot of die hard Apple users and my point isn’t to say that Apple puts out bad products, simply Apple doesn’t own the larger piece of the pie. If they are making such good products, why is this? I would argue that one of the main reasons is how proprietary Apple is, and here today we come to the iPhone. Apple has been very restrictive of their recent toy. When iPhone first came out, developers could do little more than make web applications for the safari browser built in iPhone (unless of course they hacked (jailbreaked) thier phones). Only recently has iPhone allowed development of real applications via their SDK (which you can only use on a Mac PC). And even then, getting your application distributed has been very difficult as Apple is very restrictive on the applications they distribute. They have been letting up slightly by dropping the extremely restrictive NDA agreement but there are still many hoops to jump through. Also, their operating system runs on their hardware and their hardware only. No other phone manufacturers can use their operating system. Last but not least, iPhone (as of now) is only available on ATT network (unless hacked).
The Solution
Android. Android is Googles answer to iPhone. Android is not a phone, rather an open source operating system designed for mobile devices. Any phone manufacturer can build an Android compatible mobile device and put Android on it. Also, Android is built from the ground up to be freeing for developers, not restrictive. Building your applications is much easier and distributing them is much less restrictive. The bottom line, companies wanting to compete with iPhone will be able to sell their mobile devices cheaper, have more applications and Android will be available on any/all networks. Apple will be, once again, losing out on the larger piece of the pie because of their heavily restrictive environment that doesn’t promote creativity outside their corporate walls.
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 5:53 am and is filed under Android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.