Android-based smartphone shipments leapfrog Apple's iPhone - Page 4

Macintosh Desk Accessories, 1984

Which also makes the whole Apple vs Google a joke because Google is still the primary search engine used by iPhone owners. Along with many other Google applications.

Most of this hate is media driven. End users always use what suits their needs. Like I have said before for me Android (HTC Evo) has simply been something I wanted to try. Its been a mixed bag, some good stuff, some not so good stuff.

Check out #4 at http://www.businessinsider.com/andro...ing-ios-2010-8

I own this phone and I can tell you, Samsung messed this one up. While it's true the devices hardware is ahead of its time (especially the GPU), the changes they made to Android have killed the apps that access the hardware features directly.

BTW, where did you hear the Galaxy was getting an update next month?

Not all PC manufacturers. Computer companies have come and gone over the past 20 years. There are a lot who were successful at one point that aren't here anymore. Well before phones became apart of the game.

You still miss the point. It's not that the Galaxy sports a Super AMOLED display, or whatever. Google's app store sucks, the quality of the apps is substandard due to Android users not wanting to actually purchase apps, the phone still isn't an iPod - which is the best mp3 type device ever produced, and therefore it's not compatible with iTunes - the richest digital media outlet there is... It's the whole experience that's missing from the Android line of phones.

Then, Motorola shoves it's MotoBlur skinning on you, HTC has its Sense UI, Samsung has its own UI (TouchWiz?)... They are inconsistent. The experience when moving from a Motorola Android phone to a Samsung is quite different. Every one of those UI skins slows down the phones.

As it sits, Android phones continue to be a "me too" device, that lacks the entire ecosystem behind the product like the iPhone currently has. It also lacks the public perception and desire to own the product the way the iPhone does. The public holds its breath on new iPhone releases. There's barely a headline for a new Android phone release. There's a reason for that: The public wants the iPhone. They merely accept the Android copy cat.

Isn't that precisely what a larger market share allows? A bigger eco-system. Once you add tablets, car systems, TVs etc, it's going to be even bigger.

Isn't that precisely an ecosystem, which is set to be much larger than iOS ecosystem if things keep going the way they are going at the moment and adding the new device types? Kind of like the PC wars all over again?

Regs, Jarkko

Down to the individual companies, I'm sure they would love to have one of their products sell on par with the iPhone. But like we've been saying, in the grand scheme (i.e. big picture), a single phone not outselling the iPhone isn't a deathblow to the company nor the Android platform. Performance like that would really be icing on the cake.

Lets run with the Motorola example you picked. After the RAZR phenomenon, Motorola almost all but disappeared on the consumer phone area. After releasing the Droid on Verizon, they've exploded back on the scene. They followed the Droid with the X and now the Droid 2, both of which are wildly popular and sold out pretty much everywhere. And there's rumors of a tablet in the future.

Has the sales for these phones topped the iPhone? Definitely not. But Motorola's cell phone division has been saved from death and now enjoys much boosted profits. They're earning more than enough to keep on developing new devices and those I will happily look forward to.

Which begs the question from me.

Why hasn't iOS gotten widget support?

I just bought a new 12core MacPro with a new glossy monitor for $7K
Me so happy!

If it was such an easy prediction why did not a single person in that old thread agree with me?
It seems obvious now... be cause it happened. Back then, in these forums no one agreed with me.

Nope. You will always use PC's to hold data and manipulate that data. The mobile market is good, but it has limited use. The iPhone can't do spreadsheets very well, or draw a vector based drawing, render 3D scenes, or even surf very well. What it does is provide a good enough experience on the go.

PC's will never die. The fact is that most Windows PC makers are suffering because they've long been in a race to the bottom. As they all have competed to have cheaper and cheaper goods, they've made their quality cheaper and cheaper and therefore commoditized. There's little profit in them, and the quality is garbage: crappy TN based screens, plain unattractive cases, garbage keyboards and mice... There was a time when it was common to get a quality (then Trinitron) monitor, a good high-end Microsoft keyboard and mouse, etc. with your computer. Those days are gone. Let's not get into the India based low-grade customer service you now get.

The difference between Apple and them is that Apple takes the high road. You get quality, excellent design, and a complete experience from beginning to end, and great US based customer service. But, this comes at a higher price. Apple offers unique products that they develop in-house from concept to execution that can't be had anywhere else. They make money by doing it.

It's like, sure you can own a Nissan 370Z and hot rod it to make it run fast, handle well, etc., but if you had the money, you'd rather have a Ferrari. Apple is that Ferrari - well thought out and executed from beginning to end - not just a bunch of parts.

Exactly. I really don't buy into the pissing contest per se. I'm considering an iPad to replace an old laptop. Looking at the landscape on the tablet side, there's nothing comparable on Android, just crap like the Archos. So I'd go iPad.

On the same token, I don't get people who think that somebody chooses Android because they can't afford an iPhone. That's a load of bull. To start with, if you can afford a cellphone plan with data, I highly doubt you'll find $200 for a phone on contract that steep. Next, why do people find it so hard to believe that some of us actually want features like mifi or navigation which the iPhone doesn't have? Or that we might actually Android's UI (desktop, widgets, notification blind)?

I'd concede that the average person is less likely to know enough about each OS to be able to differentiate between them and pick one at this stage of the game. However, now that Android is growing in popularity, you'll find that more and more people are going to find that there's less and less of a real world difference between an iPhone and an Android phone and more and more concern over features.

To that end, Apple should really do something about its cloud services, because this stuff is becoming the differentiatior. What's the key attraction to Android? Google's services. And that's what Apple doesn't seem to get. You can have the nicest UI and hardware, but it's utterly useless if it's not tightly integrated with the services I want to use. IMHO a good start would be making MobileMe free for iOS users to counter GMail, Picasa, etc. That would add some premium value. And then, they should be developing features like cloud2device that Google has with Firefox/Chrome and Android. It's little stuff like this where Apple is starting to fall behind and once people find out about them, will tilt some users towards Android. Why hasn't Apple done this already when they've had a mobile OS and a browser combination well before Google?

Generally speaking though, I really think it's a very personal choice, that fanboys will never understand. I get it, when I watch my brother on his Blackberry. He's a social nut. And so for him, a solid keyboard and messenger service (BBM) will a phone optimized for browsing anyday. He'll never get an iPhone or an Android, because there's no way he'd give up BBM. Conversely, for me, my choice is feature driven. I'd consider an iPhone if they added the AWS band (T-Mobile band in the US), had some sort of free navigation service and added universal voice-to-text functionality. Otherwise, I am pretty happy with my N1, and don't really feel anything missing. Most people I know with Androids feel the same (the exceptions being the ones using old phones stuck on 1.5/1.6). The again, Android came late to Canada and everyone is pretty much running around with late gen Androids that are feature packed. Anyway, people should not under-estimate how attractive features like voice to text and navigation are to the average user, especially once you get used to them. Apple's going to have match these to stay competitive.

Widgets dont make sense on tiny screens.

Not sure that I follow what apps were killed? Are you referring to the GPS problem? I know a lot of people like a stock Android UI. But I think HTC Sense is excellent. I was also quite surprised at how much I liked TouchWiz after reading reviews of it on previous Samsung phones. I toggle between it and Launcher Pro and like features of both. But it does prevent users from getting the latest version quickly. And this is one area in which Apple has done an excellent job. The ability for iDevices to upgrade to the latest OS version getting the carrier out of the equation is something only Apple could do. Android certainly has a user device fragmentation. Of course I root the phone and install custom ROMs. But it's not something most users are going to do and Google needs to find a way to fix this. The fragmentation for developer argument is utter rubbish. I have had absolutely no difficulty in making my app run on multiple versions (1.5+) and iOS has just as much of fragmentation problem for developers as Android does - which is that experienced developers wouldn't think twice about it.


http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-...ptember-708120

I do love how everyone is saying i was stating the obvious back then...
Yet not a single person (2 years ago) agreed with me.

You people are mentally handicapped.
Well i suppose that explains your love for the iPhone.

bwhahahhahahaa

Actually, I think we purchase plenty of apps. It's true that the offerings so far are not on-par with the App Store, but as soon as a well-made app is made available, people will buy it. As more and more developers are moving to port iOS apps to Android, I'm sure you'll start seeing a rise in the purchasing. It's mostly the quality games that we're all waiting for.

While it may not have as good of an ecosystem as the iPhone, the Android ecosystem does exist. And it continues to grow every day.

As for the headlines, I'm not sure if you've been watching TV, but here in the US, we get plenty of commercials for new Android releases. Verizon, Samsung, HTC, T-Mobile have all been making commercials. Hell, some of them look like teasers for a new movie that's coming out (see the X commercials). I'm sure other countries have their own commercials.

And the online news community makes a huge stink when new Android devices are made available as well. Everything from the blogs to the major news sites report on them and when they are released, review them and compare them to other devices.

You seem like the only mentally handicapped person here.

That's not the grand scheme of things. That's just relevant to Motorola. Should you or I as a consumer (or say developers) care whether Motorola singularly outsells the iPhone?

Yep. And that's not the iPhone. If the assertion is that Android copy the iPhone, then where's the widgets on iOS.

My prediction: You'll see it in iOS5.

Take a look at this little diagram:

http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/F..._SMPHN0710.gif

Makes for a more interesting comparison. The figures are pretty close to the ones in the AI article. AIs data is from a different source and focus on YonY figures which don't show trends as quickly as quarterly comparisons, but the figures are quite close to be relevant in comparison.

It would seem (a very quick analysis and full of assumptions) that the real losers in the race going forward (if the trend continues) are old WinMo users (which would make sense until WinMo7 comes along) to some extent RIM and surprisingly Apple (not profit wise, but marketshare wise), which was a surprise to me when I encountered this graph for the first time.

I'm fully aware that iP4 will bump up Apple in Q3 like 3GS did last year, but is Apple's single product strategy and updates 1/year too little or too infrequent in the long run?

Any thoughts?

Regs, Jarkko

I think Samsung put out a statement committing to a Froyo update in the UK by end September. It would follow that the rest of the world should get it about the same time or shortly after.

Android phones don't get bad press for manufacturing problems for the same reason people are hardly surprised when some hacker discovers a crucial Windows exploit

That may or may not be true ... I really don't know ... but even if true that only means that for 3 years the technology languished virtually unnoticed until Apple came along with iPhone in 2007

Maybe, but who, besides you, ever heard of them?

Low margins beats free pirated any day, in my mind.

I think they "created" the first, easy to use, business model that appealed to the masses ... something the music industry big boys are still fighting against as hard as they can behind the scenes.

My point is simply this ... whether Apple invents/creates something first or not simply doesn't matter. What matters is can they take an existing or new technology to another level .... and their past performance tells me that, more often than not, yes they can .... but that does not, by itself, insure dominant market share .... and that's ok with Apple. They'll just keep on keeping on ... making products and services that a whole lot of us love .... and making a pot load of money as well.

When Apple holds a press conference or an event of some kind, the financial world, electronic world, and everyone waits to see what they come out with next. Even if Motorola had such an event (do they?), it seems no one outside the Android community is really watching. There's a huge difference... Apple makes headlines everywhere about the new iPhone, even on Android blogs. When Samsung released the Galaxy? Very little.

To me this is a "chicken and egg" situation. Until very, very recently (and I am talking basically this summer), a lot of the apps (particularly the games) sucked. There wasn't much that would compel me to whip out my wallet. Of course that situation then leads to complaints that Android users are cheap.

That is changing though. The stuff coming out now, particularly on the gaming side (I just bought Backbreaker and Skies of Glory), is solid stuff that people will probably pay for. I expect, you'll see the stats on this issue change very soon.

I'm looking at my Droid's 3.7" screen and you could have fooled me. I can see everything from Facebook updates to the weather, to what's on my calendar, to all the texts that have been sent to me (just a tiny sampling of what I have). If I need to add information, I can do it right from the that screen.

All without having to find the icon to launch that particular app.

Exactly.

And ad that after all those sales, the profits were having a hard time breaking even, yet the iPhone is raking it in.

All of this "ANDROID RULEZ IPHONE WILL DIE" BS is just that: BS.

Why? Please tell me somewhere other than the US where Android market share beats (or even gets close) to iPhone's.


There is your answer.

It doesn't matter if it's on the iPhone, iPad, Ubuntu, Windows, or the Mac. Fact is, Apple had them first, and really popularized them with the Dashboard in OS X. Android is merely copying...

The widgets are Dashboard Widgets that came in 10.4. Yes, Android copied, along with KDE and GNOME the concept of Dashboard Widgets which had a start also on Windows, but it all goes back to the original patent concept from APPLE.

i'm an iPhone and i'm an Android.

If you're legally blind or approaching it. Is it really that bad on a 3.5 inch screen? And most widget take up a quarter to half the screen or even the whole screen.

If you are going to suggest widgets are impossible on a "tiny screen" then how the hell do you pick out icons when you use your phone?

There's no doubt in my mind that Android is superior to iOS in certain areas. iOS, just like MacOS, is made to be simple. It's effective. Sorry, but Apple wrote the original book on an effective UI after extensive research.

Maybe because none of us wanted to take the time to point out the obvious.
Would you be happy if I "predicted" that, in the next 5 years, we are going to see some really exciting stuff come along in the tech industry?

I disagree. If we are to kick Symbian and RIM, we need to go after Android with a chainsaw.

Even with what you perceive to be a small amount of news, plenty of people know about the devices they release. And it's not limited to the Android community. Tech blogs that cover all gambits of devices report on them. And again, there's plenty of commercials for their products on TV.

Do a Google search for Droid or Droid X or even the Galaxy S and tell me how many hits you come up with. While they may not gather "huge" coverage, they aren't completely ignored (like you imply) either.

No arguements that iOS is effective. Just saying that widgets work really well on small screen devices.

I think you may be incorrect about that:


"We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We wont let them."

--Steve

That's the iPhone. An iPad on the other hand will probably we able to word processing and number crunching on spreadsheets well enough for all but a single digit percentage minority out there.

And even for data storage, I daresay that in short order people will find cloud based storage or simple plug in drives far more desirable than a whole PC. Keep in mind that it's only Apple prohibiting ports on the iPad. Android tablets will probably come with USB ports that let people plug into their terabyte drives to store all their media.



Sure PCs won't die. Mainframes never did. But they'll become less and less relevant as time goes by. And it's precisely because of the phenomenon you pointed out. The commodification of PCs simply means there's more money to be made elsewhere (like in mobile computing).


Being of Indian descent, I find this quite offensive and frankly racist. You have an issue with the support provided by a company, then blame company not the country where the support staff are based.


Sure. But Apple is still relegated to single digit marketshare. Because, just like real life, not everybody needs, wants or can afford a Ferrari.

And there's a real possibility they risk the same outcome in the mobile space. Why? Because hardware price just isn't even that much of a differentiator any more. The phones bascially all cost the same. The hardware really isn't that much of a differentiator (is somebody to pick a phone solely on an extra 30 pixels per inch more?). The plans all cost the same. So now it comes down to features. And here there's some room for Apple to improve (particularly on their cloud services side). Counting on third parties to add functionality (like say mifi or navigation for example) or charging for functionality (email through mobileme) is kinda lazy and backwards don't you think?