On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Douglas Roberts <[email protected]>wrote:
> 48% is nice. > > Sent from Android. > I'm not sure the numbers really add up in the sense that having a lot of phones using android really delivers google as an alternative to apple, or puts google in the strategic position apple is in. Looking at tmobile's lineup: http://android.t-mobile.com/android-phones .. I note that there is only on motorola phone, and one that is least popular. Samsung and HTC are the rulers of the android market. And they tend to present a "fragmented market" as the pundits observe: android phones have very little identity, certainly not like iPhone does with a coherent evolution from the iPhone 2,3,3s,4 and soon 4s/5. And note, moto was one of the first to piss all over the great google ui, giving you "blur" .. a fat, hard to scrape off your device interface. So lets assume the moto->goog phone really works and google creates the same sexy line of ever better phones, just like iphone. But it still leaves google out of the greater picture: the convergence and ecology apple has with phones, tv, laptops, tablets, pods and so on. Apple has shaped the current market. They forced coherence by controlling ATT, even to the point of selling digital access by the month for pads. They knew they would be screwed by ATT (dropped calls, lousy service, bogus broadband and so on) but did it anyway because they had a longer vision of where they are going. If we are to believe the buzz about the next iphone, it will likely be truly a world phone, operating on CDMA & GSM, and even being agile with the bogus GSM broadband frequency use ATT has (non compatible with europe). So I think this is going to be hard (but fun!) to read for a while. If google really does want to be like apple in terms of complete vertical integration of their phone brand, can they be anywhere near as creative as apple has been? Or are they too on a convergence path that leverages their advantages with search and services?
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