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50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future
wiseandroid writes "It's not even a year ago that the HTC Dream G1 became the first Android enabled phone to be released publicly (on October 22nd, 2008) and now we have listed more than 50 Android phones expected in the near future." Of the 51 phones on this list, 12 (from nine manufacturers) are currently available.
This is one of the biggest ways that Android and the iPhone differ. With the iPhone, you have one phone, and one OS. With Android, you have one OS but many different phones. While the iPhone already has a huge number of apps available for their one device, not everyone wants a big touchscreen for a phone. Appealing to a broader audience by letting people choose their phone with a broad range of prices and features could be the most effective way for Android to compete. Smartphones are still only used by a small percentage all mobile phone users--it's still a growing market. It seems that Google is using this opportunity to make smart phones more accessible and more affordable. I think this is a far more sustainable strategy than Apple's one phone philosophy.
You don't understand what is happening at all.
Right now there are 100's of phones on the market, all running some sort of OS. Each of them appeal to different audiences, with different features, reliability, and carrier compatability.
Essentially, some of those 100's of current models are being replaced with models running Android. Android is an operating system, it does not define the device it runs upon. Just like I can run Linux using just a tty interface over a serial link, or I can run it with a 3d desktop across multiple screens; Android can be similarly used for different phones.
The advantages of Android over existing phone OS's are threefold:
1. cost... there is no cost to the manufacturer of the phone or the carrier.
2. compatibility... applications for Android will be compatable with other manufacturers Android handsets, so different manufacturers will compete on quality of their product rather than the amount of software available.
3. features... Android was developed to be very feature rich, of course manufacturers can disable features but if they want them it is trivial to enable them. If the public begins to demand additional features as ideas change, then Android can be upgraded to include those features.
Essentially, there were no phone OS's that manufacturers could even purchase that would result in a product so refined that it could compete with Apple and Blackberry, and neither of them were licensing their code. Android changes that.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
No, Android will never have #1, because it free.
I know what your trying to say, but I have to disagree. I fully expect to see an Android phone take #1 in the future. Why? Because once these 50+ phones are out, and the 100's that follow, there will be far more users of Android phones than phones running the Mac or RIM OS.
At some point, the public will consider Android phones to be equal to the iPhone in features and capability, but they will have choice (Querty keyboard, carrier, camera, form factor, size, screen, cost, etc.). To many people that freedom, coupled with the features and usability they want, is more than enough to keep them away from iPhone.
For Android to compete with RIM, it needs to get serious about business. The good news is, that because Android is open source, and most contributors have real jobs, its capabilities in business will quickly surpass the Blackberry. Honestly, I have been with several companies that standardized on Blackberry, and other than mail and policy managment, the phone is a waste. If Android 2.0 gets the mail part right, RIM should be worried. If they introduce a policy management server... then RIM is in trouble.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
The best camera is the one you have with you.
There are many, many photographs out there that don't rely on specialized optics or super-nice sensor specs for their artistic value. Often, the value in a photograph is just managing to capture a moment in a way that communicates the meaning of the experience. There's nothing about this that precludes using a cell-phone camera to take the picture.
Look at it this way: our expectations for good photographs haven't changed much in the past 20 years. Sure, new things have become possible that we hadn't seen back then, but ultimately the human eye sees the same as it always has, and Ansel Adams or Cartier-Bresson are still legends for the work they did even though they didn't have a tenth of the technical sophistication we now enjoy. So, even though standards have stayed more or less the same, the capabilities of even our worst cameras have increased by orders of magnitude. At some point, even a cell-phone camera is good enough to do what needs to be done, and any more technical improvement is just for dick-waving and specialized cases.