There are plenty of “Android” phones with similar specs at a similar price, they just aren’t sold much in the US because most smartphone buyers are on contract. Many chinese companies produce phones like this: http://www.dhgate.com/product/original-huawei-y300-u8833-android-4-1-dual/163374777.html#s1-4-1|1499756746 for the Asian market, although they don’t usually have Google Market/Google Experience.
Nokia absolutely needs phones like that though, their feature phone market is evaporating from underneath them like the Horse & Buggy market did when cars started to get big.
Microsoft will never be in smartphones like it was with PCs, if anyone gets to that point it’d be Android. But even Android is unlikely to reach that level of dominance. Apple is too strong in the smartphone space for one, and then I have questions about major manufacturers like Samsung that have quietly been developing their own OS for some time now. If it actually ever comes to the states and has any market share at all it instantly cannibalizes some of Android (which I guess has to be Samsung’s goal.)
I think Microsoft’s best case scenario is it becomes a player akin to Apple. Right now Apple has less market share than Android, and while it has fluctuated up and down a little bit the consistent trend I’m seeing is shipped handsets are giving Android a substantial advantage and you’ll see Apple’s market share continue to decline as more people get new phones and opt to switch from iOS to Android. There is a floor there I think, and as long as Apple continues executing with compelling devices and keeps iOS properly updated I don’t see them going anywhere.
Windows on the other hand has like 3% market share, BlackBerry still has like 6% probably entirely just people with old handsets who have been slow to get new phones (and when they do, they almost certainly won’t be new BlackBerry phones.) Since BlackBerry is also for sale, at this point I don’t see why Microsoft doesn’t just buy RIM. It would then discontinue the BlackBerry OS, but it would create a line of phones that maybe copied some of RIM’s styling and such and market those more heavily to the business user and try to create a line of Microsoft phones that achieve a reputation as being for the “enterprise user.” The RIM purchase would really just be more for some of RIM’s constituent pieces, like BBM and the whole secure communication infrastructure RIM has that I’ve not seen any comparable companies offer.
I believe oddly RIM’s core OS now which it basically bought when it purchased QNX is used fairly heavily in embedded systems, like those touch screen interfaces you find in newer cars. I don’t really see that line of business having much synergy with Microsoft, the RIM purchase would really just be for pieces of the BlackBerry ecosystem that are meaningful in the smartphone market. Maybe also buy the rights to use the BlackBerry brand name, there will be a branding issue with Microsoft’s new phones. It hasn’t gotten as much attention, but the new phones made by the Microsoft “Helsinki team” are not going to be Nokia phones. Microsoft doesn’t get rights to the name Nokia, the remainder of Nokia is going to continue on as a mapping, network equipment and etc company and will retain the rights to the Nokia name. So it might not be a bad thing for Microsoft to be able to use the “BlackBerry” brand name for a line of phones and continue using the Lumia brand name for another line.
I agree - one of the compelling things about Windows Mobile (and iOS) is that it has standards. Android is an insane mess, both in terms of device fragmentation and interface consistency. This was the thing that turned me away from Android in the end (as well as making it impossible for my not-so-computer-literate wife to get anywhere with an Android tablet) - every app does its thing differently from every other app.
You do realize that Android controls 80% of the global smartphone market - right?
There is a difference between share of current quarter shipments and share of current smartphone users. Smartphones are generally held for a couple of years.
So how would you gauge dominance? Current users? If current shipments are overwhelmingly Android, what do you think happens to the number of current users?
I think this sums up the give-a-shit quotient of this week’s announcement. 
Funny how Nokia used to be practically synonymous with mobile phones, and now it is totally irrelevant. Way to throw away your market leadership, there…
The big feature difference between inexpensive Android and WP phones is that the WP phones work well. Seriously.
Cheap Android phones work, for the most part, terribly. They bog down fast and get borderline unusable after a few months of use. The Android ecosystem moves past them and apps stop working reliably. Basic system functions can be glitchy, and they often have really half-baked manufacturer customizations and outdated Android versions.
Every one I’ve worked with (and smartphone tech support is my day job) has been an absolutely terrible phone.
Low end Windows phones work, and they work pretty consistently and reliably.
The drawbacks mentioned above are all design decisions of WP8 (save the YouTube mess, which is a recent and hopefully temporary issue) and are all part of the overall focus on simplicity of the OS. Some adjustments and improvements are certainly part of the future, but I personally happily trade creating folders and swapping browsers for having a phone that works elegantly and reliably.
I don’t know enough about low end phones in general, but I know a lot of the discount, pay-as-you-go phone MVNO providers like Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk offer underpowered Android phones like that. Some of them like the LG Optimus Prime that Virgin offered awhile back I heard had everything you’d want out of an Android phone, except the ability to actually use anything, because the hardware was so underpowered relative to the software it was running.
I think you could say there are many different measures of dominance, I think everything would need to be taken into consideration.
Current subscribers gives you a big picture idea of the total user base, it also can help you predict future user percentages as well. Apple has been pretty consistent in releasing I believe one new iPhone model a year, and I believe there is a pretty well observed two year cycle with iPhones because many iPhone customers are traditional contract wireless customers here in the United States that get a new phone upgrade subsidized by the carrier once every two years. Since the cycle began with the first iPhone, it’s unsurprisingly continued since that time to some degree.
Sales figures can be a little tricky with smartphones, because just by themselves you have no idea what portion of those customers are first time smartphone buyers or what portion are either just buying a new phone inside the same platform they were using before and what portion are switching from one platform to another.
The most recent survey of active subscribers I could find (which only goes through quarter ending 10/2012) showed Apple’s subscriber share rising from 34% to 37% and Android’s decreasing from 54% to 51%, with small moves in WP and BlackBerry. This was also only for the U.S. market, I’ve not been able to easily find global current subscriber figures.
Obviously if Android gets 80% of all shipments every quarter going forward, eventually their share of subscribers is going to approach 80%, but with a fairly large installed user based using iOS for example it will take a long time for that to happen as some decent portion of subscribers will actually keep a smart phone for more than just two years.
If you followed the trend with say, BlackBerry, you would see similar behavior. BlackBerry had been losing the sales wars for years but if you looked at total subscriber numbers it shockingly held a fairly high position for quite some time–it took several years for BlackBerry’s complete failure to win new customers or keep old ones to see its share of the smartphone subscriber base go from #1 to essentially being a niche player.
With Apple versus Android I’d say we don’t have any sort of indicator that Apple is about to become a niche player in the smartphone market. Samsung released the Galaxy S4 fairly recently which could explain its dominance in the most recent quarter, and Apple has not released a new iPhone that reviewers have found to be anything special in awhile now. It’s possible the new iPhone and iOS 7 could be that sort of moment for Apple, or it could be Apple’s exploration of larger screens (I think Apple’s refusal to go bigger on screen size until recently has hurt it, and it’s now looking at screens up to 6") results in a big sales surge, or it could be the deal they recently made public with China Mobile for their new “cheap” iPhone could be a major sales injection. Or maybe none of those things increase Apple shipments and they become a niche player.
That survey you cite is for the US only and I’d appreciate links for any cites. The cite I gave was for GLOBAL shipments.
Regarding dominance: there is a big difference between MS Dos/Windows dominance and Android dominance. MS had strong leverage on the OEM’s to prevent anything else (licensing restrictions etc.) from getting loaded onto the PC’s. Using a different OS would have locked them out of their primary money making market (Dos/Windows), so the big players didn’t do it.
Android has taken off and is clearly dominating the mobile landscape now, but the leverage is primarily in the eco system/market momentum as opposed to licensing. It seems like it’s a weaker dominance that could shift much more rapidly to something else.
IDK. The reason Unix and subsequently *nix systems like Linux became so prevalent in many sectors was that for the longest time, ATT gave it away license free. That’s the Android strategy. ‘Free’ is very appealing to handset makers.
From my post:
Why are you pointing out it is for the US only when I have already said so?
And I explained the difference between current subscribers and quarterly sales, they are not the same thing.
This discussion is over between you and I by the way, I see it serving no further purpose in terms of this thread.
So? I repeated that fact. Too bad you couldn’t also provide a link, but I had your back on that score, didn’t I? 
Sorry if you don’t feel you’re up having this discussion with me.
Yes, Microsoft became dominant not only in terms of market share (consistently over 90% of all PCs that ever get measured by things like web servers are running a version of Windows) but in terms of its relationships with its OEMs because of really good timing and a strong strategy of applying the screws to its OEMs once it had a strong position which had the effect of pushing basically everyone else out of the market. If the timing had been a little different I think we could have seen something like a robust competition between Windows and OS/2 in the personal computer OS space, with Macs representing a small share in third place (Mac might have fared a little better if there had been robust competition between Windows and OS/2 just because once there isn’t “one” single dominant OS it makes a smaller player not so immediately unacceptable.) A lot of people feel Microsoft screwed IBM over both in a legal and ethical sense over the development of OS/2 and how they proceeded to back out of the program and push their own product.
In the smartphone market Google has released a product over which it can exert little to no control over the carriers or the handset makers. In China and many other markets there are Android handsets that do not even connect at all to the Play Store and other Google services–which is really how Google makes any revenue at all from Android. Since companies are free to fork off in their own direction like that it gives Google very little actual control over all those Android devices. It certainly does better in markets here in the United States and in Canada and Europe.
Some companies like Samsung and Sony have so aggressively developed their own “skins” to run on top of Android that they’ve almost fleshed out their own quasi-operating system and relegated Android to being almost more like say, the Linux kernel which can be the underlying software under a lot of stuff that doesn’t actually appear to be Linux or act like Linux to the end user.
Which is to say even if Android was the only smartphone OS, that wouldn’t necessarily mean anything for Google. It’s akin to if Linux was say, the only server OS–that wouldn’t mean any one company would actually be controlling everything, since there are so many distributions of Linux some ran by for-profit companies creating commercial products that compete with one another. It’s a similar thing with handsets, as the manufacturers are doing more and more to customize Android.
Google does however control the google play store for applications though doesn’t it? And while companies like Samsung are trying to set up their own digital window fronts to compete with that, it remains to be seen how well that will go. Also, as long as Google controls the platform, they control upgrades and what can be done in the future. Remember that Microsoft seemed innocuous enough too - until it wasn’t.
They do control Google Play, that is their hook into Android. But because of Android being totally “free and open source” what some Chinese carriers have done (just as an example) is they create their own “fork” of Android, it still complies with all the open source licensing and all of that, but it becomes separate from the main piece of Android. Many of these Chinese carriers basically gut all the Google services (including the Play Store for example, and importantly might default to something like Baidu as the default search engine instead of Google) and replace it with their own stuff while letting Android handle all the base phone stuff that these carriers don’t want (and probably would not do a good job of) creating on their own.
As a completely closed source product, there wouldn’t have been a similar way to modify Windows without violating extant laws and licensing agreements (if Windows had operated under a similar schema.)
One particularly troublesome issue with Android, that Google has worked to correct, is all the different versions. When Google would have a new version ready to go, it typically had to be tested by both the handset makers (and frustratingly) sometimes by the wireless carriers as well to make sure it “worked on their network appropriately.” In truth many of the carriers would simply block Android updates for many of their phones, because many of these updates really make your phone much nicer. That means the customer is less likely to buy a new phone and get locked into another new two year contract. For that reason the carriers and the handset makers didn’t have an incentive to be all that timely about testing the Android updates and signing off on making them available to their customers. You always have the option of just jailbreaking and installing the newest version of Android that runs on your device, of course, but I think less than 1% of users actually does this for a variety of reasons (I’d imagine a large chunk of users are unaware of the practice, another large chunk probably assumes it is harder than it really is etc.)
What Google has done recently, is they’ve adopted a model where individual numbered Android releases aren’t going to amount to much. They won’t be major new feature releases, they’ll basically be updates that Google can only do through an actual new release. What they’re now doing is driving updates through “Google Play Services” which run on the application level on the phone, and Google can actually push these updates out with very little ability for carriers or handset manufacturers to get in the way. For all the customers in first world countries this should mean over time we see less of this business of one carrier only not giving access yet to the newest version of Android and etc; while that will still go on the actual Android version number will mean less and less in terms of what your phone does and what features it has.
First, everything you’ve said here and previous posts is nothing more than speculation. You’re hardly an expert on the industry as much as you seem to want to appear as one.
Second, you’re missing the most obvious point - Google doesn’t HAVE to give Android away. They can stop this tomorrow and then manufacturers are screwed.
Third, Google now owns Motorola. When if they do that, who do you think will have a huge price advantage
Fourth, if future updates and upgrades will be via wireless - as recently happened with my Galaxy note tablet - Google can push all sorts of crapware that I’m stuck with including the sorts of adware that makes them money.
:dubious: One shouldn’t ascribe motivations, this is a message board for having conversations. I’ve not presented myself as an “expert on the industry.” My posting history here is fairly open book, I’ve never given the slightest indication I have any expertise in IT or that I work in IT or that I’m a wireless technology professional or that I’m in the wireless industry or that I’m someone who does professional market analysis of the wireless industry.
This is a recurring problem, you don’t seem able to have normal conversations on a message board, and don’t seem to understand someone can talk about something without being an expert on it. This isn’t ‘experts exchange’ this is a place where people talk about things. This forum in particular is not Great Debates or General Questions, it is for much looser, less formal discussions on issues than those two forums.
You are absolutely correct much of the content my posts here are speculation. You say that as a negative, and miss the point. This thread is actually a speculative thread, started with a question that invites speculation as it has no factual answer–if someone could actually answer the OPs question factually that would mean they had perfect ability to predict a portion of the smartphone market in the future and I’d argue that person should use their skill to become millionaires because anyone who can perfectly predict the future of the smartphone market has all they need to become fabulously wealthy resting right between their ears.
Not really, the way open source software licenses work it is very difficult to legally take them closed source. Even if Android spun off a closed source derivative (which is very difficult to legally do using open source software), the existing open source Android could (and would) be taken up by some other entity that would continue maintaining it. What Google could do is develop its own proprietary OS and then remove all the integrated Google services from Android (it does control its own services that all run on centralized Google platforms.) But that’s like starting an OS from scratch.
Many people have been worried about Google’s purchase of Motorola for exactly that reason. What many have said, is that in a desire to make other handset manufacturers not feel that Google is giving preferential treatment to Motorola, Google has actually been too aggressive in that they often ignore emails and collaborative initiatives from Motorola to the detriment of Motorola development.
This article I read a few days ago has a lot of good information on the pains that have arisen in the Motorola-Google relationship and how Google (now about a year+ into owning Motorola) is starting to smooth them over and try to make Motorola a more integrated part of the Google business. Once that happens I think a lot of the fears people had initially could come back (I think to some degree they subsided because Motorola lost a lot of market share after the Google purchase and hadn’t released a really compelling phone in some time.)
This is definitely the case, if Google wants to use Google Play Services and its push-update features (some of this stuff now updates behind the scenes with no user confirmation required) to push adware onto your phone they could do so. Only jailbreaking to an Android distro without the Play Services module would protect you, but it would also disable a lot of Android features since it would be difficult to keep access to all the Google services and selectively block features of the Play Store.