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The Android Opportunity

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Re: The Android Opportunity

#91

Post by hboon »

jsz0 wrote: post #74
jacobian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've got no problems with Android, maybe you can solve mine: - Why does the phone crash when I try to pair with my bluetooth headset? - Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers? - Why the *@#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack? - How do I sync music between my computer and my G1? - How about podcasts? - How…

Engadget is reporting the G1, due to internal flash limitations, may be stuck at version 1.5 forever. Really horrible situation for such a young platform to already be having these issues.

Any idea if this applies to the dev phone? If it does, developers are screwed.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#93

Post by pavlov »

Ras_ wrote: post #72
forkqueue wrote: post #50

And the manufacturer to do this? Nokia. Frankly, if the N97 only ran Android and had a better touch screen it'd do most of what this article recommends.

Nokia is committed to Maemo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo_(operating_system) Here's the announcement: http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Strategiewen...

It's not an "announcement". Quite the opposite: Nokia has explicitly denied FTD's report that they would be abandoning Symbian. However, phones equipped with Maemo 5 are definitely coming to the high end of Nokia's range. (Symbian's strength is that it works with substantially cheaper hardware than any of the competing smartphone OSs, which is great for Nokia, as they are particularly strong globally at the lower end of the market and in emerging markets.)

The important point is that Nokia is adopting the Qt toolkit across the range. Both Symbian and Maemo will have Qt at the top of the stack by 2011. At that point, the underlying operating system won't be particularly relevant to application developers anymore: C++ software written to Qt (with the upcoming Orbit touch UI framework) will be just a recompile away from being ported to Symbian.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#94

Post by patrickas »

Ras_ wrote: post #72
forkqueue wrote: post #50

And the manufacturer to do this? Nokia. Frankly, if the N97 only ran Android and had a better touch screen it'd do most of what this article recommends.

Nokia is committed to Maemo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo_(operating_system) Here's the announcement: http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Strategiewen...

Nokia is actually committed to Symbian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

They denied the "announcement" made in that article: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090812-702406.html?mg=...

Re: The Android Opportunity

#95

Post by qhoxie »

mattmaroon wrote: post #54
qhoxie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people, even high-end smart phone users, choose their carrier first and their phone second. I think there is a lot of truth to that, but I also have seen a big shift since the iPhone. Countless friends and colleagues of mine have said something along the lines of "I would never use AT&T if it were not for the iPhone."

The numbers indicate that it's a small shift at best. People switch carriers every 3-4 years on average (usually citing employer discounts, pricing plans, family networks, etc,) meaning that for any given phone, you'd expect 25-33% of purchasers to be new customers. The iPhone is somewhere between 30-40%, meaning that it's probably outperforming the average by 5-10%, which is great but not indicative of a sea change…

Similar to the sibling, I see 5-10% as being a fairly solid impact.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#96

Post by mattmaroon »

stcredzero wrote: post #73
mattmaroon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers indicate that it's a small shift at best. People switch carriers every 3-4 years on average (usually citing employer discounts, pricing plans, family networks, etc,) meaning that for any given phone, you'd expect 25-33% of purchasers to be new customers. The iPhone is somewhere between 30-40%, meaning that it's probably outperforming the average by 5-10%, which is great but not indicative of a sea change…

Hmm, aren't you forgetting the mathematics of compound interest? A 5 to 10% conversion advantage over your competitors, combined with a higher retention rate -- this is going to really hurt competitors after several years. After 10 years? Ouch! It's a good thing that AT&T sucks so much. Otherwise, the iPhone would be unstoppable.

Oh it's great, and if I'm a shareholder in AT&T or Apple I'm pretty damn happy about it. (The retention rate is a total unknown for a device that's 2 years old. Even a shitty free-after-contract clamshell has a 2 year retention.)

But it's not a massive change in the power balance between carriers and phones. Carriers aren't going to offer massive concessions for something that brings in a few % more users than the other 50 phones in their lineup average. Don't forget that overall, the iPhone isn't even in the top 10.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#97

Post by davidw »

I think going head to head with Apple on the high end is a mistake. Google just isn't geared up to ever produce stuff that's quite as beautiful as what Apple consistently manages.

On the other hand, there's a ton of space below that, and a ton of space to make Apple clamber ever higher up the value chain in order to capture the margins they want, keeping them out of the mainstream market.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#98

Post by al3x »

jrockway wrote: post #8

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. Whe…

As the author of that "especially ignorant" quote, I'll try to explain what I meant.

When talking about Linux on the desktop, I'm not talking about the kernel, per se. Mostly, I'm talking about the user experience as informed by GNOME, KDE, and other Linux/Unix desktop environments, which have not been particular successes; Android's UX is a bit like GNOME on a phone, even if it doesn't use GTK widgets. This is to say that most of the applications are pale copies of standard applications on other mobile platforms, and that the UX is generally clunky.

When it does come to the kernel, I'm mostly talking about the difficulty of having an operating system that's designed to support a large variety of hardware. Perhaps I've gotten lemons, but the Android phones I've used seem to have a tentative relationship with their network interfaces.

I would actually welcome a platform that isn't an iPhone clone; that's why I got interested in Android in the first place. Android doesn't need to behave exactly like an iPhone to be a success in my book. It just needs to adhere to the same general level of quality control: things look good, they work right, the interface is intuitive, the hardware is speedy, third-party apps work 90% of the time. I don't care if the interface metaphors or hardware form factor is completely different. It just needs to not suck.

Re: The Android Opportunity

#99

Post by jfno67 »

potatolicious wrote: post #48
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers? Because the Dialer app is listing all of your contacts, because it serves as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one. - Why the @#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack? Yell at HTC, not Android. - How do I sync music between my computer and my G1? Plug the…

You've told us why these things are the way they are, but I get the feeling you feel that this alone justifies these gigantic UI holes. - because it serves as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one. Is this a good idea? When I'm in my Dialer, presumably I only want to call people. Surely the system should sense context (likewise, if I'm in the email app, it should show contacts for whom I have no em…

Having done the switch from my iPhone 3G to an HTC Magic I find both of these phones are far from perfect. I may switch back again, but believe me, both still have problems.

-My iPhone would not rotate when I was rotating my phone, I had to do it 2-3 times or exit safari and restart in the landscape orientation for it to switch. At other time the orientation changed but the width was not changed.

-I'm not a big fan of reboot so every 2 or 3 days safari would just start to crash on page load with no reason. Only solved by a reboot.

-On the reboot front, once I made everyone at home change there time. Since my phone is taking it's time from the cell provider and this as always worked correctly on my many Motorola phones, I told everybody they were 10 minutes forward. The day after, at work I saw the time on a friends iPhone and it was also 10 minutes forward. This made no sense, we have the same provider. It was probably more than a week since my last reboot. Android may have the same problem, I don't know.

-OS 3 gave us the search but before that remembering on which page some of the less used apps were was just a pain. I still don't like this way of organizing, but I lack a better solution.

-Talk about obscure way of doing some action on the iPhone. As an example, have you taken a screenshot? The way to do it appeared to you how?

-I think the HTC magic has too many buttons, but the iPhone lacks some. Even after a year of using my iPhone, I still sometimes closed the application with the home button while I was just trying to back off one level. In fact the back button on the Android and the way application stack themselves is really superior.

The iPhone 3Gs finally has a camera. Come on the 3G was not even able to read bar codes (except with red laser, doing image correction and enhancement)

After 2 weeks without my iPhone what I miss the most is the vibration/ringer switch. This is a great feature.

The one feature that keeps me from going back on the Android is the notifications "pull down"

One last thing, latitude on Android is awesome;-)

Re: The Android Opportunity

#100

Post by al3x »

boucher wrote: post #24
jacobian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've got no problems with Android, maybe you can solve mine: - Why does the phone crash when I try to pair with my bluetooth headset? - Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers? - Why the *@#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack? - How do I sync music between my computer and my G1? - How about podcasts? - How…

to be fair, the iPhone is at the same place or worse on several of these issues.

But does that excuse issues with a platform that's intended to compete with the iPhone? The whole point of Gruber's piece is that Android is going to have to exceed the standard set by the iPhone in order to capture mindshare with early adopters who then encourage wider adoption.
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