http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3132
I think there's enough room in the market for Apple to continue doing nicely for the foreseeable future, but there's an emotional attachment to the #1 spot for everyone. Apple and Linux fans both wanted to see volume market leadership in the post-PC era, once it became clear that Microsoft would *not* have that spot. Linux won this time around.
Print ads seem to say Google[TM] Android[TM] still.
On the other hand, that's been a branding thing since the beginning. My G1 doesn't say "Android" anywhere on it, but on the back it does say "with Google(tm)"
Add to this, the fact that most people still don't understand the difference between Droid and Android, which was probably deliberate on Motorola's part but it's still confusing.
Google offers carriers a revenue split on the ads when they use the official Android builds instead of just grabbing the software and hacking it up. The latter is absolutely allowed, but it doesn't get you all of the apps and it doesn't get you the revenue split if you're a carrier, so that practice will probably be largely used by cheapie knockoff devices.
On the other other other hand, who knows what will happen once the SoC-based devices start shipping in big numbers and the price of a smartphone goes well below $100. Carrier/consumer dynamics will change drastically once you remove the idea of a carrier subsidizing the phone in exchange for a two year contract lock-in.
Apple will do fine; they've got a great product that people love. What they *won't* have is market dominance. And they're probably aware of that.
I've almost given up trying to explain Droid =/= Android, especially when I have to backtrack and explain "operating system."
I don't remember where I found it first (here, maybe?), but we had pretty good luck at Swappa.com getting a very gently used MyTouch 3G Slide for my wife for about $200. If you buy one with CyanogenMod on it (it's one of the criteria you can search for, even), they make a donation to the project. I will probably find a replacement for my G1 there when I finally get too jealous of my wife's phone.
consider me the great unwashed. Droid is the Motorola phone that runs Android, which is the operating system? But there are lots of other phones that run Android too?
Is that the situation?
This is one reason why Android is quickly becoming the volume leader -- anyone can build an Android phone, but only Apple can build an iPhone.
You can even swap out your carrier-supplied Android stack and replace it with a community-supported Android stack such as CyanogenMod. I did this with my G1 (HTC Dream) and it works swimmingly.
I just walked past teh Apple Store and learned that iPhone is now available in TWO DIFFERENT COLORS!! How INNOVATIVE! That'll kill off the competition from Android for sure!
So, my wireless plan has reached the point where I could get some decent discounts.
My current phone (LG Dare) is dying badly. My son got a hold of the thing and started peeling the resistive touch sensor off of the screen... great, now I have a dead-spot on the screen...
Anyways, I decided to make the leap out of dumbphones and inch my way into smartphones.
I decided to buy (after some long deliberation and extreme amount of research) a Droid 2 Global. My boss has the same phone (only in white... mine will be sapphire/silver) and she loves/hates/loves it. (more love than hate apparently).
The thing I love about the Droid 2 Global is the slide-out keyboard. A physical keyboard is just more comfortable than a touch keyboard. Plus it's running Android 2.2 (with an option to upgrade to 3.0).
:D ladies and gentlemen, i've finally caught up with the rest of society and can get the intarwebz on my phone!
Di Mai 03 2011 16:28:54 EDT von Ford II @ Uncensored
And if you're talking about my even newer fancier dancier treo 700p it's also got an IR sensor/transmitter.
IMHO they've become obsoleted by 2d barcodes to transfer vcards via cam.
Actually glass is much stronger than aluminium. But it is also very stiff, that's why you can't bend it. Glass is resistant against scratches and I guess that you would break your phone before you would break the glass.
I just read this article with the headline "personal firewall for android". I thought: "Is blocking of incoming connections really necessary on a phone?". And then started to read and recognised that the main task of the app is blocking outgoing connections. Looks like the enemy isn't anylonger somewhere out there, it's on your phone, right in the center of your communication and personal data.
I think that's a fair statement.
I just bought an HTC Thunderbolt, and previously I had an HTC Incredible. In both cases, when I switched to the phone, I had to deal with someone hacking my Google account in some way that required I change my Google password (just happened to me last night while configuring the new phone).
Honestly, it's scary. And very irritating.
To a certain extent, some of the radio technologies can be consolidated by using a digital signal processing (DSP) chip. A DSP is more than capable of performing all the necessary bit encoding and decoding, and all the tranformations to turn a bitstream into the appropriate waveforms. Then it would just be a matter of the power circuitry to amplify the transmitted signals, and some kind of compound attena to boost reception.
My guess, though, is that phones don't use that technique because of the complexity and the economies of scale. A DSP is much like a CPU in that it requires a set of instructions to execute to produce what you want. That means additional resources from the developer to design, program, test, and deploy the DSP firmware. I'd also hazard a guess that DSPs, even in large quantity, may end up costing more on the bill-of-materials (BOM) than it would to just have three or four separate radio transcievers. If you think about it, an 802.11 transceiver part can be used in a huge variety of devices, so they can be made in much larger quantities than a DSP. That results in a lower cost to the phone manufacturers. Same goes for Bluetooth and IR transceivers. At that point, if it's cheaper to use discrete radio parts, it can't add that much more to just plop down a discrete 3G radio as well.
Manufacturing Binder
IMHO they've become obsoleted by 2d barcodes to transfer vcards via
cam.
I can copy files/programs/vcards/anything else over IR and I found out by accident that my thinkpad also has IR so I can move files back and forth between my phone and my laptop with no wires.
Totally by accident, I put my phone down next to my thinkpad and XP popped up a box saying it found an IR network something or other.
how goofy is that.