Google’s Android operating system has proven itself a growing force to be reckoned with as adoption rates among manufactures and consumers continue growing at considerable rates. I feel that Android 2.1 has finally reached a point where it is ready for the mass market. I’ve also had the opportunity to use a Nexus One with the next release 2.2, AKA Froyo, for the past month or so, and have found it even more ready for the mass market and perhaps even the enterprise.
Apple once again has built and delivered the most advanced mobile device in the market. Steve Jobs, during his interview at the Wall St. Journal conference last week, mentioned that his companies passion was to build the best products around and in this analyst’s opinion they have again set the bar by which other mobile phones will be judged.
This doesn’t mean that other competitors won’t catch up or include key innovations of their own, however for the time being the iPhone 4 and the newly named iOS4 is packed with innovation useful for everyday consumers and tech enthusiasts alike.
It may be easy for many people within the press – including the Apple naysayers – to look at today’s announcements and complain that there was anything truly innovative announced. Statements like these miss the broader picture of not only what Apple is doing but what Apple is doing for the technology industry at large. That being said, I want to highlight several things that require a deeper look.
With the KIN entering the market, HP’s acquisition of Palm, and a number of other industry events, I have been asked quite a bit about Microsoft’s chances of success with Windows Phone 7. Microsoft is losing traction in this market rapidly and is in desperate need of strategy that will keep their operating system competitive in a market dominated by RIM, Apple, and Google. If you look at the numbers released by Gartner toward the end of last year projecting mobile OS market share, they projected in 2012 Microsoft to rank 4th on the list with just over 12% of the smartphone OS market share. 12% of the market is not bad and would come out to roughly 70 million devices in that year. That being said, I can’t imagine Microsoft being content with 4th place. So what do they need to do to be successful in a fragmented smartphone OS landscape in which we expect some consolidation to happen in the next few years?
It’s been interesting to hear all the negative press and comments from the media about the iPad. Many people have been looking at the iPad and saying “What’s the big deal? It’s just a big iPod touch.” Others have gone so far as to criticize Apple and Steve Jobs directly, expressing their high expectations of innovation and then reveling in their disappointment at the lack of innovation they see in the iPad. What is clearly missed by the critics in industry and media is that the iPad represents much more of a vision of the future than people realize. The iPad ushers us into the era of Touch Computing.
In March of last year, I canceled my service with DISH Network to embark on a simple experiment. The question was, did I need my television service provider, and the experiment was to see if streaming shows from the Internet could satisfy my television habits. I connected one of my more powerful notebooks as elegantly as possible to my TV via HDMI and the experiment began.
The TV shows they are a-streaming…
In the first few weeks of this experiment, I came to find out that 90% of the TV shows my wife and I watched on a regular basis were available online from either the networks’ websites themselves or from Hulu. What suffered however was live sports and shows for our kids, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as kids probably get enough TV as it is.
With all the buzz around the iPad and the slew of tablet designs we expect to see at CeBIT this year, it is clear that there is a looming battle if not an all-out war brewing for this new category of devices. The question, however, is where tablets fit into the overall consumer market. I believe that there certainly is a market and a fit for these devices in consumers’ lives. I also believe that there are particular elements of computing that will be better on a tablet form factor then on a mobile device or a PC. For example, watching movies on a device more portable and with better battery life than a notebook certainly has value. The web in portrait mode definitely makes many web sites feel more consumable, particular ones that require a lot of scrolling like news sites. But one of the primary opportunities for the tablet that I think will shine lies with the publishing industry.
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