I don't like apple that much. They have some good ideas, but the general attitude of the company makes me suspicious. The iPhone is pretty good, but i don't like the way apple sells it. I wont be able to put my hands on one of those, because at least for now apple is not selling iPhones in Bulgaria. I like the macs too. I messed around for an hour or two with a friend of mines macbook. I like MacOS X but its not that better than Ubuntu(i prefer kubuntu though) Buuuut its too expensive. Its pricey to begin with, and when a few companies redistribute it from the US to Spain, and then to central Europe and then to Bulgaria it gets really expensive for me. MacOS x is not that good to make me buy a really expensive laptop. A Dell with ubuntu is pretty decent and i might get one in the fall(or maybe an eeepc) Anyway the iPhone is going to have some tough competition in many of the countries its going to ship. Especially with that activation thing. People in Romania are not going to be that patient, and if it had shipped in Bulgaria patience was going to be even a bigger problem. And the price for us is high, what's left for Nigeria. I admire the hackers at apple. There geniuses, but the marketing guys annoy me, maybe its just my Balkan scepticism and distrust. If you try to make a Bulgarian pay too much for something and make him wait until you make sure he does what you want him to do you are going to get your self a middle finger before you see $199 so its smart that they don't sell them here :D As for Google, I haven't read enough blogs about it's phone yet.
I'd love to see Android give iPhone a run for it's money, but I'm not seeing it happening in the early term. We still haven't seen Android in the wild. Android doesn't have a strong obsessive, visionary like Jobs.
And you can't underestimate the thundering power of the AppStore. Like iTunes, Apple is going to make it dead simple to add apps to your phone.
I was going to post something similar, but then I wondered: If building something like the AppStore in Google's core competency, and the AppStore is similar to iTunes, why isn't Google already doing something like iTunes? Is it simply lack of a locked-in hardware platform like what Apple has?
Android will NOT take down the iPhone. It won't happen.
What I think will happen is that Android will offer a compelling alternative in a way that Apple's iPhone and iPod line have never seen before. While the iPhone will still be popular, we'll have a duopoly rather than the iPod's monopoly. Just my prediction, but maybe I'm just sick of the winner-take-all markets that technology has become.
Interesting, but for me, I'd still happily use the iPhone for the same reason I have a MacBook and not something with linux installed.
I can see android being hugely successful for people who want to learn, tinker, and develop - just as linux is. But if you want to just get stuff done, I'd say MacBook/iPhone wins against Linux/Android.
Also I don't think Android has that much chance against the lure of the iPhone. There's a clear upgrade path/leverage system from iPods (which pretty much everyone has) to iPhone.
Right. The developers might balk at Apple's restrictive ways. But the end-users are probably going to be delighted with quality of the upcoming apps. It's all about controlling the seamless user experience, and what Apple's doing amounts to a subtle quality control on the 3rd party apps.
As the article points out, not everyone wants to wade through a deluge of untested applications.
I think they're sort of opposite ends of the spectrum, and that it's probably not a winner take all market. Just as Linux completely dominates MacOS X for applications where you need real control (servers, embedded, etc...) Android will be popular for many people and companies. On the other hand, the qualities of the iPhone in terms of user experience are pretty obvious, and will win a lot of people over... but probably won't dominate the market, which has never seemed to be an Apple goal in any case.
I can think of the first thing Google could do in their fight against Apple: set fire to that godawful-ugly demo phone shown in this story. It reminds me very much of all the me-too iPod "competitors." Creative, Dell, et al: "Hey, we can make one of these things cheaper, and with more features!" Then they turn out an uninspiring piece of junk not unlike that google phone, which quickly fades from view.
This popular mechanics story is tone-deaf, which is true of almost all mainstream articles written about Apple. It really amazes me how often the press and Apple's would-be competitors get it wrong. But the comments it has generated here are good, so I voted it up.
Apple customers are not interested in the highest number of features crammed in the ugliest box. They want a device which looks and feels nice. Something that's easy to figure out, that does what you want it to without having to hunt through the manual. Something that makes a nice addition to your life.
Compared to the iPhone the android just falls short because of design flaws that arn't folded well into the handset. To really be a true competitor (iPhone killer), the android platform would need to be implemented on a device that can rival the iPhones features/look (i.e. nokia s60 touch or the n98 concept).
You only have to pay a $99 (more for enterprises) yearly fee to actually deploy native apps to the iPhone. You can download, develop, and test in the simulator iPhone code today for free.
I'm not sure the SDK runs w/ XCode which is free but I believe OS X only - the language is Objective-C so it could be built on a PC but I'm not sure how you'd emulate.
