Posts Tagged: android

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26
Feb 10

R.I.P. Palm

Come on, admit it: we all knew the Pre would not save Palm, didn’t we?

I mean, I must have bought/used Palm’s complete product line back in the 90s, but they really lost me with the Treo. They dropped the ball a few years ago when the competition started to do ‘proper’ USB, synced to Outlook without 3rd party software. Turning to Windows Mobile made Palm into e “me too” company, so I didn’t even take notice of their new stuff anymore.

Had the Pre come out before the iPhone it might have had a chance. Not that it’s technically necessarily worse, but it has lost the fight for developers before it even hit the market. The type of developer that is attracted by making money fast will certainly aim for the iPhone. Open source developers are much better off developing for Android, which also has a well established marketplace.

So, what would make anyone develop for the Pre? That’s a question I find hard to answer.

The marketplace seems to agree – this is what the Wall Street Journal writes:

“As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being.”

This means that the carriers have unsold inventory and will not buy any more devices from Palm. This happens at a time where the iPad will soon be here and new Android devices are appearing in the store any other week.

From a consumer side I can’t see a lot of buzz for the Pre either. O2 has TV spots in germany, but I have yet to see someone I know use a Pre.

OK, who wants to disagree…?

UPDATE 2010-03-22: Seems like I have a point: http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/03/21/who-will-buy-palm/

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4
Nov 09

Mobile OS winners: iPhone, Palm WebOS, Android

At least that’s what Aral Balkan thinks, and I’m tempted to agree.

greenshot_2009-11-03_23-10-03

“WTF?” I hear you say – what about all those years of Symbian and Windows Mobile dominating the market?

Well, these are great operating systems, and they deserve a lot of credit. But from *today’s* perspective, they bet on the wrong horse.

What makes the iPhone, WebOS and Android different are three main things:

  • As stupid as it sounds, the fact that you could only buy the phones with a data plan finally proved the point that connected devices are far more usable as non-connected devices. Yes, you could use all those other smartphones online as well, but people only seriously started doing this (in numbers) when they were ‘forced’ to buy proper data plans.
  • Having many more users with ONLINE smartphones paved the way to app stores and mobile consumption of online services. They also had proper browsers that you could really use on the go for the first time (don’t give me Opera Mobile now – please….).
  • The three mobile operating systems above were designed with ONLINE in mind, and they only make sense in online scenarios. This point is made very well every time I leave the country and can not afford the rip-off data roaming rates, which turns my great iPhone 3GS into a quite bulky iPod that can’t even do GPS without data.

Now the next step is affordable data roaming. I’m pretty sure this will happen over the next few years.

The first step towards this may be – strangely enough – that Amazon started selling the Kindle (US version) in the rest of the world. I heard someone from the US say yesterday that he’d be buying an international Kindle in the US (!) to use it on international trips.

If that kind of madness doesn’t trigger innovation nothing will.

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29
Sep 08

HTC Dream – Unsyncable?

So the HTC Dream, Google’s Android phone, does not sync to any desktop app?

Why isn’t there the same outrage as over the iPhone’s iTunes link, and all the other perceived lock-in?

Give me a break.

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24
Sep 08

iPhone vs. Symbian vs. Android

Tarek has written a well detailed post on why he prefers a Symbian S60 phone over the iPhone. Mainly he mentions technical reasons, such as lack of multitasking or the iPhone’s mediocre video and bluetooth features.

Google’s new Android phone, the G1, has gotten most of this weeks media attention. The funny thing is, it seems it’s even weaker on features than the iPhone, something like the mobile equivalent of Google’s Chrome browser. No Exchange support, no street view in Google Maps (remember – it’s a Google phone!), less memory.

I have to say, from an end user perspective, the iPhone is simply the best thing you can get. While some things may still be missing, you have to remember that Apple has not even been in this game for one year. Compare the usability of the iPhone with what Nokia came up with after 10 years of Symbian S60. I find it hard to believe that they will suddenly start seeing the light and making their phones user friendly.

User Experience has always been Apple’s specialty. The integration with an iPhone gives you music and entertainment capabilities that the competition will have a hard time catching up with. You may lament the forced link to iTunes, but frankly, I don’t get that – do people really prefer to manage their 16 GB music library by pushing mp3 files into folders manually? The there’s the music store, which lacks any comparable representation from competing vendors. Nokia is starting their music game with the Nokia Music Store, but even though they’ve had a 9 xear head start, they’re at least 5 years behind with that.

The App Store is another iPhone instant hit. True, banning the podcasting app is not good, and yes, it’s a kind of lock-in, but still: if you’re a developer, what do you prefer – put your stuff in Nokia’s Download Store with a horrible shopping experience (don’t get me started on Nokia’s strange certificate methodology, which will force you to reset your brand new phone’s clock to last year to make the phone accept your application), or Apple’s one-click App Store that might just make you rich pretty fast?

I really do understand all the anti-lock-in and Symbian-is-such-an-open-platform complaints, but think about it: what’s the system that makes life easier for you? Apple’s control over the iPhone user experience is exactly what makes it such a compelling offer for users. For me, that’s all what counts.

If I want to fiddle with stuff, I’ll buy a train set.