A couple of months ago I openly asked for dream phone of mine to be designed and hence made. A couple of weeks ago I swapped my makeshift mobile with an Android and my life has changed since. Yes, it is true. I always desire to have an iPhone: I have tasted the power of Blackberry with Nokia’s E-Series and enjoyed the large, paranomic photos taken from my Samsung ultra slim handset. The fun of downloading and running all sorts of applications is a first for me, except for limited experience with Nokia and Samsung. I liked my Samsung phone though: it is light, “pocketable” and it slides with styles and communicates well with my touches (until I try iPhone).
For one reason or the other , I have to give up my favourite phone to my old man and the search for the next phone began. Luckily, the search didn’t take long. Android-powered phone became a great substitute for the much desired iPhone. Refusing to pay a huge amount of money (around USD 787) for a phone that I will replace in 1 or 2 years’ time, I opted a cheaper (around USD 213, after trade-in of USD143) and yet comparable device in modern life. With a touch screen that recognizes gestures, sensors, accelerometers, wifi, GPS (or aGPS) and HSPA connections, I become a true mobile warrior with mail, news & weather update, location finder (as well as the other associated services such as food, shopping and ATMs finder), online “socializing” and a lot of stuffs to do to kill time while in a queue or waiting hopelessly for something to happen. All of a sudden, I am more efficient than I expect myself to be. Like what my horoscope on the day when I purchased the phone described, it opens up a whole new life with surprises and changes.
“Big deal!”, I can hear this from the ever growing number of iPhone owners. They have this, “we have already all these indulgence long time ago” in their looks. But guess what, Android is going to change all that.
To be honest, I have heard of the Android word too often for the past 2 years. I was like, “Big Deal, it’s just another Operating System for mobile devices”. To some level, I was not wrong to think in that way. It’s running on a Linux kernel and coupled by a Java Virtual Machine: 2 of the most powerful open-source (in other words, free) software in the world. What is really different now is the simple word called “application”. What iPhone or iTouch taught the world is applications that can be downloaded and used for free. The capabilities of the device are immediately extended to a limit that can only be determined by the creativeness of application designers. Digital songs are now a fad of the past. So are the digital videos and talking iTouch. Applications are the “in” thing nowadays. You can do all kinds of stuff (as mentioned above) with the applications. If there is anything you don’t like about the apps, just remove them as they cost nothing… Imagine, in the older days, when we happily purchased a IBM compatible PC with MS-DOS (alright, not to exaggerate too much) or Windows, the first thing after booting up the PC we see a colorful window that was to be interpreted as the desktop. We were expected to work on that desktop. But there was nothing much we could do. The only application that is opened more often than the calculator app is probably Solitaire. The point is: we need more applications than just those provided by the OS to make full use of our computers. Otherwise, they would just be performing the role they had in shops or companies (to show a sign of intelligence or technological advancement).
Until the Free Software movement arrived, every application that we wished to try out provided a painful experience of facing the verdict that whether we had purchased the right software. With free applications, we learned more about our needs of these applications and became more knowledgeable. It was a delightful and carefree experience.
One reason why Linux is still losing its long time battle with Microsoft Windows is the user friendliness or ease of use. Most people are already pampered by a wonderful tool called mouse and have a distaste of keeping two hands locked to the plane of bricks in front of their screen. This may explains why Android may have a better acceptance than its predecessor if not, cousins from the PC world.
Another benefit of Android is that it can run on many mobile platforms. It doesn’t have to be running on devices with the bitten apple logo. It can run on your favourite Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, HTC, or even BlackBerry if they like. It is pretty much like Microsoft Windows running on Dell, HP, Acer or Toshiba hardware. It doesn’t have to be using an Intel or AMD chipset.
Guess what? It will follow iTouch or iPhone (or even iPad) closely as the platform software shifts from one hardware domain to another. It is not locked to just mobile phone devices or platform. One day, a TV might be powered by Android, which really prompted me to ask why Google is investing on another OS called ChromiumOS. Unless the answer is Chrome OS is actually meant to match up Mac OS X, I can’t take in any other explanation. Back to the topic, Android will grow in terms of width, depth and heights.
Apple is feeling the strain of managing the quality of its applications and starts to charge money for any application that wishes to be listed in their Store. This is uncommon as it is never practised by Microsoft (they only do so for the different hardware running below Windows) on the PC platform. It is unclear whether Android or Google will follow suit. To me, software quality only grows by rules of Darwinism: evolution and survival of the fittest. The perfect example is stable software I am using now from Sourceforge and GNU.
From one angle of view, iPhone portrays the image of elegance, class and sophistication. Android phones may look pale in that kind of comparison and hence, considered to be more rugged: something suitable for the streets or alleys and probably the mass market. I would imagine such marketing campaign to differentiate the two in the future. Of course, Apple is capable of taking the mass market with iPhone, just like how it took away the entire market with iPods. The same could happen to Android makers. Take for instance, a Vertu phone with Android.
The two camps (i-whatever and Android) will be inseparable from now on. There are tons of application developers who want presence on both software platform in order to achieve universality. Of course, more competition will come as Microsoft, Symbian and Palm OS (or maybe WebOS) realize the importance of applications. So far, the tens of thousands applications should act as insurmountable barrier to entry.
The story is the same as having a very powerful TV with fast processing speeds and display of high resolution, but not enough content to keep the viewers tucked in their couch.
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