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Analyst Predicts Android Overtaking iPhone In 2012
Market watcher Gartner is claiming that by Q4 2012 Google's Android smartphone OS will have overtaken Apple's iPhone. Currently only the sixth most popular phone OS, Android is set to rocket into second place behind Symbian if the predictions are to be believed. The reason for the changing of the guard is that "many handset makers are betting their futures on Android, while Apple is just one company." 2012 rankings place Symbian at the top followed by Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry."
You lost me at Gartner.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The problem with WinMo isn't the OS itself. It's that Microsoft never pushed OEMs to build much more into their devices than the existing apps and services supplied with the WinMo development kit. So it's a half-baked system sold as a complete solution.
Google Android has the exact same problem. Google is focused on developing a great OS, but the better the OS is out of the box, the less likely OEMs are to develop their own IP and create real differentiation, not to mention a truly user-centric experience.
This is where Apple's iPhone really shines. Since it is in itself a final product, Apple can exert a huge amount of effort in order to meet their own user-centric standards. The product succeeds or fails as a product, not as a delivery of middleware to handset manufacturers.
What are you talking about? Is this another issue with dumbed down US market? I don't own an Android phone, but I played with one. Has touch, has accelerometer, has GPS, has compass, has apps. Fuck iTunes.
"many handset makers are betting their futures on Android, while Apple is just one company."
Lots of companies bet their futures on Linux 5 years ago and are doing just fine, but has Linux surpassed Windows as top desktop OS?
Google is just one company.
Microsoft is just one company.
Just because some handset makers are betting on the future of Android, doesn't mean their bets are panning out.
Oh yeah.. and their bets can pan out without their OS overtaking the iPhone OS.
By that same logic, the iTunes store should have been crushed by rivals (amazon, walmart, emusic et al) in 2007. Guess what? Didn't happen that way. I think that android will gain marketshare, but most of it will be from Symbian and WinCE Mobile (or whatever they're calling it this year). Apple will also gain market share at an equal or greater pace, fueled by the advantage of the app store. Focused competition will beat apple (remember Palm vs Newton?), but unfocused, dispersed competition is going to have a hard time beating Apple at their own game.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Yeah. Isn't this exactly what we heard about Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform? "It's a whole multivendor platform. Apple is just one company. Of course PlaysForSure will win." How did that turn out again?
I'm not necessarily saying the iPhone will become (and remain) as dominant in the smart phone market as the iPod is in the music player market, mind you. But the specific reasoning behind this specific prediction is clearly faulty. Tech industry analysts tend to assume that there's something inherently attractive to consumers about multivendor platforms, but the consumer market has demonstrated several times that this is just not the case. Consumers don't care about multivendor platforms in any abstract sense; consumers buy products, not platforms. They'll only gravitate toward multivendor platforms because of the specific products offered within those platforms.
If, for most people, there is no specific Android product (i.e. combination of device and software) that is superior to the iPhone, there is no reason the iPhone cannot outsell all Android products combined.
Note, again, that I'm not necessarily saying this will happen, just that there's no inherent reason to believe it can't.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/04/ballmer-says-iphone-has-no-chance-to-gain-significant-market-share.ars
Seconded. I don't need to attach my G1 to a computer to do any sort of updates or activation, and all the hardware features you describe have been in the G1 since day one. And yes, with the 1.6 update it has multi-touch.