Having used Windows Mobile for 4 years (both the smart version and the touch version), Palm OS for 3 years, iPhone for 2 years, and soon an Android, I think I’ve been through the “mobile revolution” for quite some time. As I’ve been researching the Android platform as of late to get rid of the crappy service known as AT&T, I’ve come to the conclusion that people who’ve never used all the flavors do not “get” what each of the companies really offer.
First off, a smartphone needs to be able to make calls and receive calls stably. This concept seems so obvious that “hackers” just seem to forget about this. When I used Palm OS (4.5) and Windows Mobile (6-6.1) it was almost expected of you to run “cooked” roms. These alternate firmwares will always add and remove features of the stock rom, thus making the bland phone OS faster, prettier, and more functional. The caveat is, it almost ALWAYS made the phone unstable in some sort of way. I can’t begin to even count how many times my phone would reset for no reason, drop calls because the phone locks up, or just plan crash due to memory errors. Couple this with the fact flashing your phone is no quick endeavor along with having to replace apps, contact information, setup your app configs, etc it gets irritating fast.
I bring this up because it seems the majority of folks are claiming that Apple NEEDs to open up their phone to beat Android. My question is why? Other than a few hackers wanting to “customize” their phone, what purpose will it serve?
The Apple SDK is miles ahead of the Android SDK/NDK at this point. Heck Android runs ALL of it’s code in an interpreter. The Android NDK is far from complete to allow access to all of its hardware acceleration, specifically audio/video which is what the majority of the people care about as it pertains to games and such. So the big question is what will you gain from the iPhone when it’s opened that you can from Android? It certainly isn’t the ability to “root” the phone as the majority of the Android phones now are still not rooted and all iPhones/iPads/IPod Touches have been jailbroken. It certainly isn’t from the apps as we’ve already seen the iPhone kick ass with some of the most intensive and amazing graphics on ANY smartphone in that territory. So I really don’t get it.
At what point do we stop “hacking” and just use the phone for it’s intended purpose? Maybe I’m getting older or just finally seeing the light, but I’d venture that the majority of phone users don’t care about all that mumbo jumbo. If my phone can make and receive calls, execute code that I’ve written or someone else has written, and integrate smoothly with the internet I’m a happy camper. I don’t want to have to hack my OS, I just want to use it for it’s intended purpose.
In the end I honestly don’t care if I’m running an iPhone or an Android at this point and look forward to the Sprint Evo as I’ve had nothing, but good service from Sprint all these years. The Evo will give me the SAME functionality of an iPhone including the apps that I use often at this point as a phone. The only thing I will miss is the music integration with my car and home, but I’ll likely still keep an iPod around for that (sorry no other phone/media player/device has as much integration power as an iPhone/iPod).
So Android community, stop trying to be “better” and just be better with actual useful and fun software. You can complain how “closed” an iPhone is, but in the end does it really matter?