Samsung is hurting Android

I don't really care for Samsung's overpriced plastic phones, but their S-Pen is all sorts of awesome.

Why no-one else is innovating in that area is beyond me. Or do google prefer us to type our data in, because it's easier to index?

> Are you suggesting that screen sizes and resolutions are uniform among Samsung devices? Drivers are the same? That is nonsense.

...No? In fact my post said exactly the opposite of that:

> all cause a LOT of issues and these things all exist on virgin Android just as much as Samsung's strange re-imagining of the ecosystem.

I am saying there is fragmentation between two "virgin Android" devices. Therefore making his point that virgin Android somehow "solves" fragmentation wrong.

Samsung has a lot of fragmentation. So do "virgin Android" devices. Android has fragmentation because there is too much incompatible hardware and for some things the abstraction is more weakly enforced than for others (e.g. hardware acceleration).

Yes, Google should be supporting active pens in a much bigger way. There are certain "niches" in the app ecosystems where the iPad and the iPhone are much better than Android, and that's mainly because of Google's almost complete disregard for those categories of apps such as: games, music tools, and drawing/designing.

Rumors are Google begin to address gaming at next I/O, and some rumors said they will announce something about audio latency improvements in Android, too. But I'm not expecting them to announce anything about drawing yet.

> Samsung's phones aren't as much better than Motorola as Samsung seems to think they are. It isn't hard to see Google pumping the next Razr model with significant advertising dollars and claiming the crown for best selling Android smartphone for itself. Remember how fast Chrome beat out Firefox and and IE?

It's the brand that matters. Motorola's is pretty beat up and is losing a lot of money every quarter even after Google bought it. I doubt Samsung warming up to Google will stop it from marketing the next Razr phone anyway.

Also, much of Chrome's success among non-geeks came from default bundling and installation with Flash, Acrobat Reader and Java updates, not from Google's marketing. A lot of Firefox users that I had moved from IE during the IE7 days had no idea how they ended up with Chrome on their machine.

>Samsung should have been content slipping under Google's radar and riding that wave. I can't see how poking the Google beast is a good idea.

I don't think it's as easy for Google to sell tens of millions of phones as you think it is. They've had some major screwups with hardware like the Google TV, Nexus Q etc.

The time is right to capitalize on Android's big weak spots (OS fragmentation, disorganized app infrastructure, indifferent branding) but I don't see Tizen looming large yet. Samsung is doing a great job selling phones to consumers, but it's not in a great position to buy up the whole Google Play collection one piece at a time, and it doesn't seem to be trying to get developers and advertisers interested in Tizen at the moment.

If their long-term plan is to fly close to Android and then swap it out for something completely different, I'd be very excited. As a longtime smartphone user and current Android developer, I've been through the transition from one proprietary platform to another... BlackBerry, iOS, Android... I'm weary of dismissing a dozen app update notifications from my tray every day, and I'm tired of "apps" in general. I don't want to jump to another copycat of the same old junky, cluttered world. If Samsung is prepared to offer a fresh way of seamlessly being in the physical and digital worlds without having to navigate through a bunch of noisy, crappy apps (possibly without even the candybar form factor), I will be right there, wallet open. But as the author points out, it looks like the current iteration is just to load up a bunch of crapware onto a plastic toy, and users have to buy into the whole infrastructure if they want access to their favorite brand. No thanks.