About competition from the Androids
People are writing off the Blackberry in favor of a future market dominated by iPhones and an army of Androids, making the battle more between operating systems, Apple’s iOS4 vs. Google’s Android.
Even though the RIM Blackberry line of smartphones is still in the catbird seat, many analysts are seeing it as a legacy line and all the buzz is about the iPhone from Apple and the Androids by everybody. That is a major point, of course, in the strategy of Google and their partners: there is just one iPhone which is only available in the U.S. via AT&T, while Android phones seem to be available from everywhere with an almost infinite variety of hardware. This point is made in an article by CNET, in which there is some discussion of the obvious benefits of having so many ways to sell a product such as Android, especially since most phone features are controlled by their operating systems.
It is certainly true that people like variety and the ability to pick their favorites from a large field of similar products. It surely is true in such ubiquitous fields as automobiles, breakfast cereals, and cigarettes. It is why General Motors had a zillion brands selling almost exactly the same cars, why General Mills has so many similar cereals, and why every brand of cigarette seems to come in almost infinite variety of sizes, strengths and flavors.
But there is some downside, too. If your cell phone operating system is available to all handset manufacturers, you are going to have to put up with a wide variety of handset design and quality, some of which are better than some others. It is easy to see the differences in Android hardware, some of which is industrial and cheesy and some of which is very nice indeed, like the HTC Incredible. What Google will end up with is a wide variety of user experiences, from horrible to excellent, among users running the same operating system, because of the design and quality of the handsets.
Apple’s design and build quality are second to none; when you buy an iPhone, you get an excellent operating system running on an excellent piece of hardware. That consistency of quality and good user experience is what sets the iPhone apart, and what has made it what it is today. The iPhone represents quality, all the way across the board. The Android phones represent an excellent operating system on handsets that are all across a different board, from excellent to nasty.
So you can’t talk about an Android phone like you can talk about an iPhone. That is why this “battle” is not exactly what is being advertised by the tech press. It is not the iPhone vs. Android phones. It is, instead, the iPhone vs. each individual phone running the Android operating system. It is already clear that the public is voting against some of the Android phones and for others with their checkbooks. So the real battle is among the various Android handset makers, fighting it out for their own Android supremacy. Apple only has to compete for the discriminating customer against the best of the Android phones, where it will win at least as many sales as it loses. And that is what makes it all interesting, much more so than the boring A vs. B “war” that is being portrayed by the media.
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June 21st, 2010
I think the author is off the mark. The assumption that the iPhone is competing against the best of the Android phones is not accurate. Competition can also be on the basis of price, or features, or which carrier supports the phone. Some people dislike the AT&T network so much they are abandoning their iPhones.
“Best” means different things to different people. The wide variety of Android phones gives consumers the the choice to decide which phone is best for them.
The battle really IS about iPhone vs all of the Android phones.
June 21st, 2010
Incidentally, the first paragraph of the article suggests the story is about “writing off the Blackberry,” but the Blackberry subject is dropped after the second paragraph, and the subject shifts to the competition of iPhone vs Android.
The original subject is of great interest to many people, and a more thorough followup would be welcome.