iPhone vs Android
Well there’s a post title that normally sparks heated debate. We here at Candid Innovations love them both. There have been some interesting developments though:
Google buying Motorola for $12.5 billion really shows how serious they are about the Android platform and the move definitely will make their patent problems more manageable. Part of me wonders however, if one of the reasons for the move is the realisation that one of things that works great for Apple, is that because Apple can control both the hardware and the software, you get a reliably excellent user experience guaranteed.
Currently the Android experience varies widely between different devices, and so one way to compete is to start producing your own phones so you can show off how great your OS really is, (or buy someone else’s phone company that owns lots of patents) It will be interesting to see if HTC and the others are quite so happy about this development if Google slowly starts to push Android users towards its Motorola handsets using reliable user experience as the selling point, and starts getting heavy handed with some of those patents.
Apple also appear to be taking several leaves out of Android’s book looking at some of the features of IOS 5 which I cannot wait to see, and so the war rages on.
In the end I think there is more than enough room for both of them, and I hope both IOS and Android continue to evolve, and I believe healthy competition drives excellence!
One thing Google should take note of though is the fate of Betamax during the video format wars. Although Betamax was arguably actually better than VHS (I’m not saying Android is better than IOS or vice versa by the way), ultimately the demise of Betamax was due to the fact that the VHS format had more choice of films. There is no denying the Android app store is currently the poor cousin of the iPhone app store: even the most avid Android user will probably admit to occasionally being frustrated at waiting for one or other of the popular iPhone apps to be ported to Android (some never get ported). If google can work out a way to solve this problem, the phone wars will become even more interesting!