Obviously feeling a little overlooked in the aftermath of Apple’s high profile SDK release, Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, has been doing his best to remind everyone about a little know mobile OS called Android.
Following a presentation on Thursday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Miner stated that he expects Android to be more successful than the iPhone.
Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone
Miner went on to point out the significant restrictions of the iPhone SDK that will potentially limit the scope for iPhone applications.
There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment
This comes on the back of Apple’s boasts of having supplied 100,000 downloads of its SDK in just four days. Google’s Android SDK has been downloaded 750,000 times which is certainly not to be sniffed at either. Either way, with Windows Mobile and Symbian also thrown into the mix, 2008-09 might set the stage for an OS showdown that makes Apple’s battle with Microsoft back in the day look like a playground scuffle.
(Via Yahoo! News)
It’s an interesting face off & and traditional technology one - a slightly messy open platform versus a very dictatorial closed platform (significantly Apple in the role of Microsoft). I think Google will win in the end because not even Apple can change the mobile device business model in its favour in the longrun.
If I were to predict, I bet on iPhone os (Mac OS) on mobile. The reason is simple - simplicity and usability. However, a better interface doesn’t necessarily sell the products, it’s the marketing and the buzz that counts. So far, I hear “I want an iPhone” but never hear “I want And…roid”. Sorry, I had a bit problem of spelling out Android as I write.