If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from, and as seen before, it has the potential to be awesome. Whatever its current state is now, the only thing that matters is that it can run even on slow processors. The apps and programs will be made by the thousands of people using it. Android has IMMENSE POTENTIAL to take on anything. And obviously it will outsell iPhone, its a free platform compared to the iPhone which is a friggin phone.
to be fair, lots of things that haven't been released have lots of potential.
It's a case of wait and see with Android. I think it's getting a lot of hype but until the products hit the retail channels, I will reserve judgement. Late this year for the first products, they say.
If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from,
There is your problem right there...
The entire reason Apple products are so successful is because Apple imposes very rigid guidelines on how stuff works. Geeky folks lambast the company for being so closed and for their tight control, but it is Apple's rigidity that allows them to make products that have a reputation for ease of use and reliability.
Android will be a design by committee product with a bunch of bozo executives from clueless companies like Motorola and HTC all trying to pull the platform in whatever hot technical direction they read about in an in-flight magazine.
Remember - for all of Google's hype, they have only truly succeeded in dominating one bit of the market (search). Some of their other products are strong, but the vast majority of their product lineup is half baked beta ware. Apple has a stream of knock out products on the books delivered by the current team.
How many successful and stable open source apps are there? And how long did the stable ones take to become stable? One of the few successful, well known ones I can think of is Firefox. Even at that, there are MANY people whose never heard of it. Failures? Open office. It has been in development FOREVER and 99.99% of people who KNOWS of Open Office still use MS Word.
You gotta remember, most people can't unlock an iphone even w/ a 3 step guide. Your sisters, girlfriends, parents, and business friends won't know how to upgrade this Android thing-of-a-jigga.
But if Android ever does succeed, its going to take more a few years. By then, many things would have changed. Bottom line is, most people would like to just use their phone, not constantly tinker with it.
@Brian You are actually questioning the success of any open source applications?? You have to be kidding me? Open source as a concept has been incredibly successful, From operating systems to reusable software libraries and components, to end user software.
- Linux and Apache run 50% of all web servers on the internet. - Firefox/Thunderbird have a significant share of the market - open source is very popular in software/web development, think: LAMP, Eclipse, GCC, PHP, Perl, TCL/TK, Python, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SqlLite, Subversion, Mono, and just about every web application framework/app server/ content managements system (Zope, DJango, Zoop, Drupal, DNN, Jboss, etc) known to man.
- open source tool and utilities are used extensively. Some examples include freeNas, Samba, RealVNC, lighttpd, Squid, Clamwin, TrueCrypt, Wireshark, Asterisk, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Putty, STunnel, QEMU, Snort, CygWin, NMap, Ethereal etc etc.
- Many, if not the majority of sucessful commerical applications not only use some form of open source software components in their software, but also use open source IDEs, compilers, and debuggers to create it in the first place.
- Linux as well as BSD variants are very popular in high reliability servers and embedded systems.
- open source is also very widespread in the scientific world, including molecular biology and DNA research, computational and analytical chemistry, astrophysics and astronomy, applied mathematics and engineering, and other areas benefiting from computational models and simulation.
- open source is also very popular in end-user apps such as, Abiword, Open Office, Scribus, Audacity, SongBird, GIMP, Blender,Dia, Xara, Paint.net, Inkscape Miro, Adium, Pidgin, Xvid, VLC player, MythTV, VirtualDub, AviSynth, ImageMagick, POV-Ray Azureus, and a million other apps.
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If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from, and as seen before, it has the potential to be awesome. Whatever its current state is now, the only thing that matters is that it can run even on slow processors. The apps and programs will be made by the thousands of people using it. Android has IMMENSE POTENTIAL to take on anything. And obviously it will outsell iPhone, its a free platform compared to the iPhone which is a friggin phone.
to be fair, lots of things that haven't been released have lots of potential.
It's a case of wait and see with Android. I think it's getting a lot of hype but until the products hit the retail channels, I will reserve judgement. Late this year for the first products, they say.
Plus a few years to mature, I say. Google has the cash to do something good, but whether they do or not is up in the air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)
Right now, it's (deservedly or not) lots of hype, little substance.
you know when people are not that interested in a topic... when the first comment is a frigging paragraph ;)
It isn't that hard to outsell the iphone.
All you need is a decent phone offered in both CDMA and GSM. How about Motorola Razr? That's success right there.
"There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from,..."
Rarely is that a plus point.
Here I'm thinking of Gnome versus KDE.
If there isn't a sound, base UI in place, then all of Google's efforts are largely self-defeating...
I for one, never loved Steve...
The iphone is now a teenager and android is still an infant. There is a long road and many revisions to go.
If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from,
There is your problem right there...
The entire reason Apple products are so successful is because Apple imposes very rigid guidelines on how stuff works. Geeky folks lambast the company for being so closed and for their tight control, but it is Apple's rigidity that allows them to make products that have a reputation for ease of use and reliability.
Android will be a design by committee product with a bunch of bozo executives from clueless companies like Motorola and HTC all trying to pull the platform in whatever hot technical direction they read about in an in-flight magazine.
Remember - for all of Google's hype, they have only truly succeeded in dominating one bit of the market (search). Some of their other products are strong, but the vast majority of their product lineup is half baked beta ware. Apple has a stream of knock out products on the books delivered by the current team.
@OneLove
Android is not an infant, it is still pre-natal. Has not even been born.
Evaluating Android now is literally counting your chicks before they have hatched.
How many successful and stable open source apps are there? And how long did the stable ones take to become stable? One of the few successful, well known ones I can think of is Firefox. Even at that, there are MANY people whose never heard of it. Failures? Open office. It has been in development FOREVER and 99.99% of people who KNOWS of Open Office still use MS Word.
You gotta remember, most people can't unlock an iphone even w/ a 3 step guide. Your sisters, girlfriends, parents, and business friends won't know how to upgrade this Android thing-of-a-jigga.
But if Android ever does succeed, its going to take more a few years. By then, many things would have changed. Bottom line is, most people would like to just use their phone, not constantly tinker with it.
@Brian
You are actually questioning the success of any open source applications?? You have to be kidding me? Open source as a concept has been incredibly successful, From operating systems to reusable software libraries and components, to end user software.
- Linux and Apache run 50% of all web servers on the internet.
- Firefox/Thunderbird have a significant share of the market
- open source is very popular in software/web development, think: LAMP, Eclipse, GCC, PHP, Perl, TCL/TK, Python, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SqlLite, Subversion, Mono,
and just about every web application framework/app server/ content managements system (Zope, DJango, Zoop, Drupal, DNN, Jboss, etc) known to man.
- open source tool and utilities are used extensively. Some examples include freeNas, Samba, RealVNC, lighttpd, Squid, Clamwin, TrueCrypt, Wireshark, Asterisk, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Putty, STunnel, QEMU, Snort, CygWin, NMap, Ethereal etc etc.
- Many, if not the majority of sucessful commerical applications not only use some form of open source software components in their software, but also use open source IDEs, compilers, and debuggers to create it in the first place.
- Linux as well as BSD variants are very popular in high reliability servers and embedded systems.
- open source is also very widespread in the scientific world, including molecular biology and DNA research, computational and analytical chemistry, astrophysics and astronomy, applied mathematics and engineering, and other areas benefiting from computational models and simulation.
- open source is also very popular in end-user apps such as, Abiword, Open Office, Scribus, Audacity, SongBird, GIMP, Blender,Dia, Xara, Paint.net, Inkscape
Miro, Adium, Pidgin, Xvid, VLC player, MythTV, VirtualDub, AviSynth, ImageMagick, POV-Ray Azureus, and a million other apps.