Google activating 300,000 Android devices per day, for free - Page 3

Apparently, you don't see the same things I do when I walk around a mall here. The big 3 are all now pushing Androids as differentiators between their product lines. Look how quickly each of them rushed to launch their version of the Galaxy S. By the way, try and get a Captivate at a Rogers store. My roommate has been trying to get one for 2 months. It's nearly as rare as a white iPhone 4 these days.

Sure they have iPhone 4 posters in the store. But the iPhone is quickly becoming just one of their many flagship products. That's what happens when your biggest competitors also carry your star product. Just watch. AT&T will start pushing Android a lot more once Verizon gets the iPhone. I expect that 85% smartphone marketshare that the iPhone has at AT&T to drop rapidly once the iPhone launches on another carrier. Carrier choice means that it's iPhone fans that'll be on the move. They won't have the chance to stack the marketshare numbers at one carrier anymore.

I'm not saying iOS numbers won't get a nice bump from Verizon. However, the extent to which people think this will happen is vastly overblown. Verizon's got something like 90 million customers in the US? Assuming all of them are on 2 year contracts and assuming 25% of them are in the market for smartphones, that's just over 31 000 potential smartphone sales a day. Even if iOS were to capture two thirds of that (and that's quite a big IF outside of the first year or two on the Big Red), that's still only about 20 000 additions to the iOS posse a day. If Android even halves its current growth trends, it'll be able to best that number handily by the time iPhones show up on Verizon.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario at all. Apple still rakes in billions. Verizon customers get more choice. And there's a nice no-cost operating system available that's putting a smartphone in reach of most of the world's population that can't afford $200 on-contract or $700 off-contract handsets. It's a win for everybody.

This is all great and everything, but Google is activating 300,000 devices per day, for profit.

Horrible analogy while overstating the problem of carrier influence.

Every Android smartphone that I'm aware of has shipped with the Android Market. So anyone bothered by the look/feel/pre-installed apps (I'd contend that it's a small minority of users) can install Launcher Pro or ADW Launcher from the market and achieve a stock-like feel while making the carrier's influence virtually disappear from an end-user perspective. It is a highly customizable experience where 3rd party apps have equal footing with core system apps.

Contrast this with Apple who lets you rearrange some icons and only just allowed you to change the wallpaper in the last major iOS release.

Wow. Daniel never ceases to amaze.

A completely incoherent article completely biased against Google spewing outdated, incorrect or flat out misinterpreted statements.

Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
"the definition of open: 'mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make."

Lmao. Yep, "open."

You've got to be smoking some funny cigarette to think this is a good thing.

And this is different from every other company on the face of the planet how?

Prada phone for hardware and pretty much every dumphone back then that had a grid of icons.

I'm being only a bit facetious. The iPhone's biggest innovations (imho) were the huge leap in touchscreen tech , the app store and most importantly, Apple's marketing which showed the masses how accessible smartphones could be. Keep in mind that when the iPhone launched, the RAZR line was still kinda popular and smartphones were for uber-geeks or business folks.

Explain please...

Aren't we agreeing then? Android is designed to ensure no one-one removes Google from its dominant position. They don't want competitors, just like MS. Apple wants to define itself against the competiton, not kill it, because they think customers will think the products are better. This is irrespective of App Store approval policies or letting Flash on the iPhone.

Prada phone??!! Please...

Only a bit facetious? You think Apple scraped their original iPhone designs within the 3 weeks between the Prada leak and the iPhone demonstration? Thats a lot of coding in a short amount of time. Crazy how they also figured out how to add a capacitive multitouch in such a short time to best Prada its almost as if Apple had been working on their iPhone OS and HW for years. \

Nice one! Best post today!

A few days ago, an article was published on AI that suggested that Android activations were leveling off -- 214,000 per day was up only slightly from a several month earlier 200,000 per day.

Several of us questioned the 214,000 number as being too low -- especially since it should have included Black Friday and the one million Galaxy Tabs sold into the marketplace.

Is any of this accurate? Is Google or Rubin cooking the books? Does it Matter?


I don't presume to know the answers or motivations, but here's an interesting set of calculations:

214,000 per calendar day x 7 ~= 1,500,000 per calendar week

1,500,000 per calendar week / 5 ~= 300,000 per business day


So:

214,000 per day ~= 300,000 per day

Capite?

Verstehen Sie?

Comprenez-vous ?

Entiende?

Вы понимаете?

Since when do you need to activate an ipod or an ipad?
Okay, iPad 3g maybe...

OMG this post actually made me literally laugh out loud. You can't be serious. I'll bet the Apple store has tinfoil hats for $29 that you could use to make sure you're never spied on again.

While you're at it, make sure you never use a credit card, a debit card (actually don't use a bank account at all), don't file your taxes (maybe consider ditching your social insurance/social security number), etc. Might even want to ditch your driver's license or the issuing authority will know where you live.

If you're really worried, PM me, I've got some property on Mars I'd like to sell you where you'll be untrackable...but then I'd know where you are so.....

All I'm saying is that the form factor and the OS concept is hardly that revolutionary. Candybar touchscreen with a grid of app icons. That's not to say the other stuff (how reliable and solid the touchscreen was, the app store, etc.) wasn't revolutionary. But people act as though the candybar touchscreen is manna from heaven. That's patently untrue. It's just that for most people (particularly in the USA) they went from a RAZR to an iPhone that's why the iPhone seems "magical".

Or it could just be that somebody made a mistake with the numbers. Honest mistakes do happen. Sometimes somebody puts in the wrong figure into a press release. Etc. I'd wait for more confirmation. Though I do think Rubin's deliberate tweet is probably far more authoritative.

Yeah 300,000 per day for 5 days = 1.5 Million a week.

He probably used business days instead of calendar days to inflate the numbers.

People sometimes think that any company can copy something in a matter of days

He is probably counting business days only

*I see Dick Applebaum caught it before I did

OK. So they can see us all from the big spy satellites in the sky and from all the survellience cameras at the cross sections and the bodegas and the boys at Google know that I last did a picture search for Miss Teen, USA and shopped for a DSLR camera. Why don't I just give you my Social Security Number and the PIN to my bank account.

I dont know of anyone who thought the candy bar design was revolutionary. The iPhone is the most profitable and coveted handset because of its focus on key technologies that were overlooked or simply not conceived of prior to its existence. If its jut about some simple veneer as proof of accomplishment then there are many iPhone knockoffs running WM6 to choose from. just dont go more than a screen deep in your usage.

Even if more devices are being sold with Android I still can't get over how many companies and how many different phones it takes to sell the same amount of product as Apple.

Do you think Bin Laden has an Android or an iPhone?
Hey, I wonder what Obama and the CIA uses? With this Wikileaks thing going on, we can't even trust who we're sleeping with. OK. Free Android for all us robots.
Hey, new battlecry! ANDROID IS FOR ROBOTS!
ANDROID IS FOR ROBOTS!
ANDROID IS FOR ROBOTS!
ANDROID IS FOR ROBOTS!

Bingo.

Notice that there is still no single iPhone-killer. Simple reason: they don't know how to make one. An iPhone in design, UI, ecosystem, is something special. An HTC name-of-the-month device is just another phone running some hodge-podge version of a generic OS.

Incorrect. The purpose of Android is to ensure that an open platform exists. Carriers are free to integrate Microsoft collateral with android. Apple could modify Android to look and feel like iOS. But the core Android OS would remain open.

This doesn't ensure google remains in a dominant position. It ensures that google and other companies are not locked out of the market.

All "iPhone killers" always have been, and always will be, flops.

Come on people, lets summarize.....

iPhone = amazingly magical
Android = crap
WP7 = revolting crap

Help me understand this absolute need for there to be an "iPhone killer". Why does another platform need to absolutely "kill" another to be considered successful?

Lets summarize indeed...

Look at it this way. Android came pretty much from nowhere against a field full of giants (WinMo, BB, iOS, Symbian) in 2008. The G1 didn't really get that much press and it only gained a niche following on T-Mobile. In two years, its managed to shove aside WinMo and BB and garner just as much of a media following as iOS.

And against all issues that are said that should have killed it ("fragmentation", to sum it all up), it continues to grow all around the world.

This hardly seems like a "flop" to me. Give credit where credit is due. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that it was a flop.

So Anroid's reason for being is, in part, to make sure that Bing is not locked out of the market?

What's Google's reasoning for helping MS? Which other companies are there in search, and why does Google want to help them too? Is it 'cause they're lovely people?

The only thing LG Prada is known for is apparently being the source of inspiration for the iPhone even though timelines don't really support it. It wasn't known to be that great of a phone.

Apple isn't successful because they do things first, it's because they are often the first to get it "right". Apple may not have been the first with a candybar touchscreen phone, but they were the ones that demonstrated how good the candybar touchscreen form factor could actually be.

You're not getting it... start from my earlier post and work your way forward...

There isn't a single Android phone that comes close to the sales numbers that Apple achieves... it takes all the king's horses and all the king's men to get Humpty to even teeter a bit on the wall...

If you want to compare apples to apples, as you say. Compare os to os or phone to phone. Why compare one phone to an os operating on hundreds of phones? That seems to be the ridiculous comparison. And apple has one tablet, android has several. Even with multiple tablets combined, they probably don't sell as many per day as iPads. Youre the one with the flawed logic.

These numbers include 4 iOS devices and literally hundreds of android devices, both phones and non phones. I think apple is holding it's own quite well. Besides, dominating the market is not the only way to succeed in the market.

Ok. This ties into my question to Quadra. Why is it absolutely necessary for a single phone to come close to the iPhone in order for it the platform to be considered a success?

If it's a "flop", then why are there Android phones everywhere? Doesn't a "flop" usually mean that no one's adopting/using it?

Meeeeccc, Android has only one tablet with access to Android market and the numbers only count devices (phones and one tablet) with access to market.

please, check the facts

Yeah! I don't necessarily see anything malicious -- people look at numbers from different perspectives. For example, an accountant or a manager may look at numbers as M-F (budgeting) measurements. While a PR person will look at those same numbers as accomplishment targets/thresholds.

The problem is, as I tried to illustrate, that we don't know (and don't ask) details to back up the numbers -- when, what period, what do they include, what is an "activation", can it only happen once per device, once per OS reset/upgrade, does company X report numbers the same way company y does, etc.?

Without really narrowing down the details, the numbers are interesting -- but meaningless.


For example, if we accept Schmidt's August numbers of 200,000 per day, then doesn't the recent 214,000 per day number seem low?

Could it be that those August numbers were for business days, and therefore 200,000 x 5/7 ~= 143,000 per calendar day..

With that perspective the current number of 214,000 compares well with 143,000 in August.


Or, it means nothing!


See! I am even confusing myself.

Ok,
Many different Androids, many different versions, many different carriers.
1 iPhone, 1 version, 1 carrier (for now)

and iPhone is still ahead of everyone else!
and everyone else has to GIVE AWAY phones to keep up!

Android doesn't look like a platform to me. If there is one defining feature of a platform, it's that you write an application for the platform, and it works on all the machines that run on that platform. This doesn't happen on Android. See Rovio's Angry Brids experience or evidence.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/...id-devices.ars

Android is a portfolio of technology that can be complied to run on commodity hardware and skinned. That's different. And I think the defining difference that does not allow for an accurate comparision between the installed base of Andriod and iOS.

Google relies on third parties to install Android on their phones. iOS is unavailable to third parties, so is BB and so was Symbian at the time. The only competition Android had was WinMo which was not made for touch screens. If a company like HTC wanted to build a good touch screen phone, the Android OS became the best option. In fact a lot of Androids success stems from HTC building really good Android phones.

"Android came from nowhere" ---- sure, an OS with the backing of Google is "from nowhere"

"Against a field of giants" ---- I think you mean on the backs of giants (HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc.)

"managed to shove aside WinMo" ---- Dude, WinMo was already dead

Androids a great OS and all, but it isn't a little guy against the world success story, and OS marketshare is hardly the defining factor of success for Apple anyway (see OSX). The iPhone doesn't compete against Android, it competes against phones produced by other phone manufacturers, many of which are using Android right now. If a better OS becomes available to them, they will use that instead. Google should worry more about WP7 than iOS, because it's the OS that will try to lure hardware manufacturers away from Android (the open source MeeGo could also present a threat, but that remains to be seen). Apple and RIM aren't going to be licensing out their operating systems, so Google doesn't really need to worry about them too much.

Quadra, nor I, said anything about a flop.