Ballmer Slams Android As Cheap and Overcomplicated

jfruhlinger writes "On the day Android Ice Cream Sandwich was released, Steve Ballmer livened up the Web 2.0 conference by lobbing potshots at Google's mobile OS, calling it the choice of 'cheap' phones and claiming 'the biggest advantage we have over Android is that you don't need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone.'"

Comments

Re:He does have some good points

[Anonymous Coward]

And you typed it all in less than a minute...

Same old Ballmer smack talk

[Lemming Mark]

That sounds like same Ballmer who laughed at the iPhone because of how expensive it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Same negative marketing smack talk. Also, enjoy the irony that expensive phones are apparently now good, and cheap is bad. (although, of course, cheap isn't the same thing as inexpensive - it really *is* good to be neither expensive nor cheap).

Re:He does have some good points

[DragonWriter]

Android is a copy of iPhone, but not that well done.

O RLY? So why is it that so many of the "cool new features" in iOS 5 are features that Android has had for quite awhile now?

Because Google uses a time machine. Each iteration of Android copies, imperfectly, features from future versions of iOS.

Re:In other words,

[clueless_penguin]

It will squirt phone calls...

Re:He does have some good points

[h4rr4r]

Give up already. You had the comment pre-written. WinPhone7 might be great, but if it is let it win on its merits not your astroturfing.

You can say lots of about a product and not be a shill, prewritten comments and promoting tons of product from one vendor at once is clearly shill behavior.

Re:He does have some good points

[ScrewMaster]

you blog is wrong, it is comparing stock android to HTC modified android. The HTC modified android looks a lot different than the Google android on the nexus phones.

All these brainless comparisons of Android vs iPhone vs Windows 7 GUI styles are made hopelessly irrelevant by one simple fact: the Android user interface is completely changeable on a moment's notice by installing one of numerous third-party home applications. Right there in the Market: no tweaking, rooting or hacking needed. Just click and run: some of the best ones are even free! Even though both iOS and Android are Unix-derived operating systems at the core, one of the two locks you into what the manufacturer thinks is best for you ... and the other doesn't.

Hell, there are so many home apps in the Market (some of them are seriously slick) that there are several "home manager" apps that let you switch between them at will! To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, currently on my rooted G2 I have ADW Launcher (the default for Cyanogenmod, my favorite Android ROM), ADW Launcher Ex (my current favorite home app), Launcher Pro, Go Launcher, Regina 3D (uses the GPU and is visually stunning) and a few others. I sometimes switch interfaces just because of what I happen to be doing at the time (or, ha ha, who I happen to want to impress .. Regina 3D is good for that, "No way this is Android." "Yeah way". "No, no way.")

Furthermore, there are Android distributions that have completely rewritten user interfaces. There are several variants of the MIUI ROM: one of the more popular ones that is more iPhone-like in operation. Don't particularly care for it myself, but then again I don't particularly care for the iPhone. To each his own, I suppose. Regardless, it is utterly painless to give your Android device a complete GUI makeover in a matter of seconds. Consequently it's really, really hard to say that any phone's GUI is better than Android, because there are a ton of easily-installable options, many of which are very professional. I'm also tired of iPhone fanboys making cracks about "well, if I wanted to have to recompile my OS just to get my phone to work I'd have an Android." That's just pure ignorance (or spite) and belies the fact that Android really is pretty goddamned flexible, in ways that iPhone and Windows Mobile will never, ever be. Now, understand I'm making no claims about anything special about Android per se: it's just another smartphone operating system. What I am saying is that Android owners gain the many benefits of an open-source environment. Neither the iPhone or Windows 7 Mobile will ever be open. Period. End of statement. Do they have a "better" user interface than Android? Hard to say: which Android user interface are we going to compare against? Which version of Android? See the problem?

We may also be seeing an early trend by device manufacturers to start opening their boot loaders. HTC, for example, has actually released a bootloader SDK. That's a first, and it's amazing. I'd be willing to bet money that since Google now owns Motorola that that company will change its stance on third-party operating systems (I believe Cyanogenmod already supports the Atrix.) It's past time that handset makers start treating their products for what they are: general-purpose pocket-sized portable computers, and not dedicated black boxes of which they maintain ownership after they're sold. If this continues, it means that the concept of "rooting" will become a thing of the past, and that user choice in operating systems will become a reality. Not something that the likes of Microsoft and Apple ever want to see, but it's good for the consumer.

Speaking on a more general note about operating systems, one thing that generally stands out in the Linux world is the number of distros which are derived from a few older ones. Debian, for example, is the foundation for a number of other distributions (Ubuntu/Ku