The Android Opportunity

A well-written piece from an avowed fan of Apple. What makes Gruber not a mere fanboi is his willingness to take valid criticisms of Apple seriously.

I hope that someone over at Palm reads this and uses it as a playbook for the Pre. Actually, I hope that someone over at Palm already thought of all this, and that this is their playbook. And others as well.

The platform you need to beat in this plan is not the iPhone. It's the jailbroken iPhone. Make something that the real tech-heads and first adopters cheer, and they will be your beachhead. Do that, and you can get droves of the rest to follow you!

As usual, the hard part is not the idea, it's the execution.

He's missing the #1 area where you can compete with Apple (at least for now) and why I think the Palm Pre will do well: carriers. Most people, even high-end smart phone users, choose their carrier first and their phone second. You'd lose sight of that reading TechCrunch or Engadget too much, but talk to people in middle America and you realize it's overwhelming. Be it due to laziness, marketing, employer discounts, customer satisfaction, not understanding how simple number portability has made it, whatever. I'd bet for every person who has bought an iPhone there are 1 or 2 who at least would consider it if it were on their network.

The Palm Pre and Android are both at a huge advantage here. That may not be true when Apple's deal with AT&T runs up though, but for now it's easily the biggest competitive edge available.

As a recent Android convert, I am confused by all the "issues" that people keep mentioning. Everything on my phone Just Works. When I change the color of a calendar on Google Calendar, the color on my phone's calendar widget changes. When I change a contact on my phone, GMail and Google Voice update almost instantly. When I dial a number on the normal dialpad, my call is automatically routed through Google Voice. When someone who is not in my contacts calls me, a little message pops up with the White Pages lookup results. (This is a third-party app.) When I feel the need to tweet a picture, I click a button, the camera turns on, I take the picture, write some text, and my picture and tweet are posted. When someone messages me on Google Talk, and my computer's Jabber session is idle, my phone makes a noise and I see their message.

I was on the train today, and wanted to catch up on HN. I read five or six articles, and all of them rendered perfectly in the included browser.

Basically, this is what I consider an absolutely perfect phone experience. I could not be happier, as an end user. (And as a developer, I am really really happy.)

I am just confused as to what these iPhone converts are doing. I think they are expecting an iPhone clone instead of a completely different smartphone.

One more thing. I found this comment especially ignorant:

Android suffers from the same issues that have plagued Linux on the desktop for years: the lack of integration between software and hardware, buggy and under-featured applications, a lack of attention paid to user experience issues. The encouraging openness and bits of innovation in Android are overshadowed by mediocrity.

What does this even mean? I see perfect integration between my apps (and the Google apps on my computer), and of course, the underlying OS kernel has no effect on the user experience unless it is really bad.

From a business perspective, making a Porsche-caliber android phone doesn't make too much sense for Google. As far as I know, their business objectives include

1) getting as many possible people online with their cellphones searching the web & clicking ads,

2) stealing Windows Mobile market share,

3) and selling android apps to as many people as possible.

And I believe, in that order.

Besides, I like being able to replace batteries, sim cards, and sd cards on my g1.

edit:formatting/typo