Android gets no love! @ d o l l m o n t . n e t
It seems like all the smartphone love is dedicated to the iPhone. Even here in Viet Nam where there is no “official” iPhone presence, all the cool kids have an iPhone. My poor G1 gets no love…
Chris, via Android gets no love! @ d o l l m o n t . n e t.
I’ll admit it. I’m an avid iPhone user. While the lack of background tasks gets on my nerves once in a while, overall I find it to be the best phone I’ve ever had.
Chris, makes a valid point in his post about Apple’s marketing department being a driving force in the success, however I don’t think that’s all there is to it.
The iPhone was the first device to really challenge Microsoft and RIM. It was a smart move to go after the consumer market first; it’s where the competition was the lightest. But the iPhone really was ground breaking. From a feature standpoint, it was a brilliant product coupled with brilliant marketing that brought a more powerful phone to the masses.
Combining a phone with an iPod was a killer idea. Mobile Safari also helped to change the landscape of mobile browsing. As a touch screen device, especially compared to Windows Mobile phones, it was a lot of power in an amazing form factor. The iPhone also had a lot of room to improve, which is the state of Android now.
Push is a great way to make up for the lack of background processes. Even if it’s a bit dicey right now, I applaud Apple for innovating in this area. With applications like Prowl, you can push notifications from applications or custom scripts. I’ll go over some of my custom scripts in later posts.
I still think that Android is a groundbreaking platform. Openness is amazing when you can script your phone to do anything you want. I’ve seen some amazing demos of applications like Locale, and the actions you can bind to practically any event.
But the operating system is lacking that polish that Apple is so well known for. It also suffers from the same Achilles’ heel as Windows Mobile. It’s too easy to run too many background applications and kill your battery. It even lacks the ability to tether.
I do thank all of Android’s early adopters for dealing with the rough edges and helping it gain the momentum that it needs to become a powerhouse in the future. Right now it’s that polish that keeps me attached to my iPhone.
You’re absolutey right that Apple’s brilliance was to gently but convincingly (reality distortion field, anyone?) grab the hands of the iPod-toting consumer market and lead them to SmartPhone land. Three years ago I rolled my eyes at all the workaholic corporate suits attached to their clunky and hard to use Windows Mobile Phones – and today, I don’t go anywhere without my beloved iPhone. Brilliant, indeed.
Look at you two defending your beloved iphones! Junkies!!!
Alas, for the Toaster, through many beatings and finally, a rant from Gruber, has convinced me to move to the iPhone.
Goodbye my crack berry! The days of your forever crashing user interface and relentless JAVA errors while browsing the web or reading my email shall *hopefully* be gone and replaced by the love that is The Steve.
I’ve not nearly had the problems with my Bold that i’ve heard other people had with their BB’s. In the year i’ve owned it I had the pull the battery once because it stopped recieving e-mail, but thats the only problem i’ve ever encountered with it.
I have nothing personal against the iPhone, or even professional about it. It’s a nice piece of technology and fits its market very well. But, the only business i’ve seen iPhone’s used in mass was by car salesmen. Managers, excutives still go to the Blackberry because it does what it was meant to do. It’s a business tool. It has rim’s encrypted network behind it as a business option and an enterprise soloution for those companies big enough to need secure mobile communication.
iPhones are nice, but they are a toy. You have to hack it to get any sort of good use out of it (I don’t know any iPhone owner that didn’t jailbreak their phone). It’s an amazing toy, being said, but I’m still happy with my choice.
@randomed
My iPhone isn’t jailbroken. Exchange supports works better than my old Windows Mobile phone.
As for the BlackBerry, BES is yet another application that I have to install, license and manage. ActiveSync can push out policies, remote wipe phones and is secured by SSL (assuming your exchange admin isn’t a dork.)
There’s even enterprise deployment information available for the iPhone.
RIM isn’t obsolete, but they’ve got more competition in the enterprise space than before with the iPhone.
It’s a shame that the Pre doesn’t support Exchange policies, or they’d be in real trouble.
The competition will be good though; it will feed innovation in all of the platforms.
I don’t think that BES is that big of a deal (again, assuming the admin isn’t a dork, but the argument of competancy can be applied to almost everything). When dealing with the corporate environment one would expect to already have licensing practices in place and is centrally managed.
I’ve never used ActiveSync, So I won’t comment on how it works comparitavely to BES; I will say that In every enviroment I’ve worked in, I’ve either seen a business owned BES, or a provider Tie-in. I’ve never seen an AS deployment in corporate environments where mobile commuication was key to business in any place that i’ve worked.
Competition does indeed breed innovation and i’m glad that RIM does have some now, but they’re still in the lead by a wide margin for business and for good reason. As time moves on we’ll see if that changes, but atm they are the “Standard”. I would love to see cheaper prices from them since they are no longer the only game in town; and as always I would go with the cheapest option, since thats all you get in business these days.