So, I’m reading about the iPhone and Android today, and I am curious as to how people think this battle will play out. Obviously Apple owns 2008. How will Google compete in the OS market? Apple has a jump on Google. The 100m Venture Capital Fund for iPhone dev is a bit more substantial than Google's 10m prize. So with millions of iPhones already on the market to be developed for in the short term, do you think it will entrench Apple in the market when Google’s more open phone comes to town?
For those that don’t know the Android is Google’s phone, it will be open as is google’s custom. Google is pushing their own OS.
Maybe these links will help drive interest in this thread. 
Android is the future. Especially with Motorola having screwed themselves hardcore by subjecting their research division to Sigma quality thingy. Er. You know, process control. Doesn’t work well in research, and has about destroyed the company.
What do you see happening in the short term while iPhone shores up its market before Android gets to market? How will Android make a splash when it is finally released? I already have an iPhone and may very well be married to it by the time Android comes out, though I love Google as a company.
The iPhone has the cool factor going for it, but it’s not that practical. The touch screen is difficult to type on, and it’s rather large and heavy. I seriously doubt that it will ever come to dominate the market. Business users, the majority of smartphone buyers, look for features over bling. One of my friends has an iPhone, and when he whips it out it certainly looks cooler than my Blackjack II, but mine has much more features including:
3G data speeds
GPS
Turn by Turn navigation
Mobile Office
Full QWERTY keyboard
The iPhone isn’t going to be cheap enough to fight Android. iPhone isn’t a competitor to Android. Windows Mobile is. The iPhone is a niche product, a very nice one, but I’m not going to sign up for AT&T to get one, nor am I going to jailbreak one.
So, the Android platform will go cheaper and wider than the iPhone one, and will be shared along multiple vendors. Sound… familiar… to anyone? Like, say, Mac vs PC?
I’m not saying the iPhone will fail, I’m saying that it’ll stay more or less where it is, while things change around it. In a year, there will be a metric buttload of Androids similar in nature to it, and the iPhone2 will be ready. And so on, and so on. The real key to the Android I see is that it’s a step to detach phones from service providers.
Sure, I’ll give you that one.
I don’t see it as being that relevant because the iPhone can triangulate your location based on the towers it uses.
Google Earth
The SDK will take care of all this.
This is fair enough. I prefer the touch screen myself.
The Software Developer Kit will make the iPhone the most feature rich phone on the market.
It’s not as accurate as GPS, and as such can’t be used for true turn by turn navigation. Google maps gives me an error of about 500m or more, which obviously doesn’t work too well for roads.
Big difference. Turn by turn navigation tells me to turn when I need to turn, while google maps/earth can’t. Certainly google maps is nice (I have it on my phone too), but turn by turn is the bee’s knees.
Maybe, maybe not. But since you bring it up, this is another huge advantage of my BlackJack. You are tied to Apple to get your software, and get charged 30% of the price for the privilege of being so. I can install any program from any source that I like without ATT or Microsoft’s approval.
I can’t see how anyone can type on the touch screen faster than a physical keyboard, but I guess it is possible.
And why exactly is that? Why would any company develop solely for the niche market that is the iPhone?
You make some very good arguments. This one is the one that I have something really to say in response.
- $ 100m in a VC fund.
- This is the argument that has always been made about Apple. For the same reasons people develop for a Mac.
- iTunes pays for the entire logistical end of the distribution. Apple is providing a service for that 30%. They will help promote the better apps, thus between the marketing, and that Apple pays for the servers, and lines that deliver the content, it allows developers to focus on development alone, so somewhere in the supply chain you’d be paying a lot of that 30% anyway.
- I own Apple stock and benefit from that 30%.
- Double-Sized Hi-Res screen.
Still, more open units will definitely be the serious challengers to the iPhone.
There isn’t anything an iPhone can do that my Windows Mobile phone can’t do* (and in time, what Android won’t do.) By contrast, there are things I can do on my WM phone that, without getting into shady practices and voiding the warranty, can’t be done on the iPhone (though I imagine the SDK will change most of that.) Plus, mine was cheaper ($100 with a service plan, would have been $300 without the plan. Compare that to $400 with the plan for the iPhone, and no option of no plan or a different carrier.)
*I guess the visual voicemail thing is one thing WM can’t do. Which is too bad, because it is really damn cool.
And yet the iPhone has sold millions of units and is about to tap a market that previously shunned it because it did not do particular things that they needed it to do. On top of that there will be a ton of dev being done. They’ll have a lot of loyal users around the time Android comes out, who are used to programs that they love on their iPhone, just like a Mac.
I’ll concede that there are other phones on the market, but do you disagree that the iPhone is in good market position right now?
I just bought an HTC Touch today, through Bell Mobility. This thing rocks. It’s Windows Mobile 6.1, with a front end custom designed by HTC, which has iPhone-ish gesture navigation and such. It’s quite a bit smaller than an iPhone. The iPhone UI is nicer and more polished, but I can get about 10,000 applications for the Touch.
In Canada, the Touch is the only way to get unlimited mobile internet, btw. Bell offers a $7/mo unlimited data package which lets you use any internet service for free, so long as you don’t tether the phone to a laptop and use it as a modem. It uses EVDO 1X which is plenty fast for this device.
I haven’t had it long, and I’m still waiting for Bell to activate it so I can use the internet, but my initial impressions are really positive. It can handle an 8 GB SDHC card, stream video up to 700 kbs, and has a host of other features. And it’s not much bigger than a Motorola Razr .
It’s in a great market position right now, except for the only-AT&T part. (Yes. I know you can jailbreak.)
This reminds me of
Basically, the iPhone will soon be getting all of those, and it will still be miles ahead in terms of user-interface and ease-of-use, so where does that leave the other smartphones?
Cheaper, and not locked to a single carrier?
The new AT&T is as evil as the old one. They’re working really hard to make it that way.
I have had a Blackberry (8700c) and I currently have a Treo 750 (F’ing hate it) with Windows Mobile. I can type MUCH faster on my iPhone than I ever could on either of those devices. Between the other two (Blackberry & Treo) I was faster on my Blackberry.
I do think that is an unfair comparison though as the iPhone was not originally designed for business use. Yes, with the new releases coming up the iPhone will support Microsoft Exchange but still…
MeanJoe
Seeing as you can’t legaly buy an iphone here, I have obviously not tried one. However the missing 3G would make sure I would never buy one. I think pretty much all providers here offer atleast 1.5Mbit HSDPA now, with 7.2Mbit being rolled out by some now.
I work for a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) and the number of our customers that are subscribed to our 3G service has increased by over 1000% in the last 1.5 years. Things might be different in the US, but here in Europe, android will win as long as the iphone doesn’t do 3G.
Btw. I have a Nokia N82, it’s symbian based and has hsdpa, gps, wifi etc.
I hope that’s true. I just sunk 2k into Apple stock this morning in the hope that this is the valley of the stock price and that by the time the iPhone 2.0 really gets revved up, it will really start opening up the market.
Apple’s problem has always been exclusive control of their software. They still haven’t learned the lesson that just because they don’t have competition YET doesn’t mean they can be jerks with their tech.
Marrying the iPhone to AT&T was a terrible mistake that hasn’t nearly finished playing out.