Informal Brain

One of my co-workers showed up in my office today with his shinny new google android phone. I played around with it a fair bit and I much say I like the UI and the speed of the various applications. The time it takes for mobile safari and search boxes to become active on the iphone is painful. But I digress…

The android platform vs the iphone platform is starting to feel like a familiar battle. The battle between windows and OSX.

Let’s see, OSX was the operating system that could. It didn’t have all the fancy applications but it ran faster, and the core productivity applications were faster and better integrated into the core platform. Windows, had a million applications, and games but most of them were mediocre and were not well integrated into the core experience. Sound familiar?

Perhaps slow and steady will win the ultimate race here. Google might be in this battle for the long game, and in the fickle consumer market which is cell phones they might just have a better platform.

Here is the problem I see with the Android platform.

The OS + the carrier’s customization = mess.

Which carriers will offer up a phone you can customize with your own OS build or application software downloads? The real power of android is separating the software from the hardware. Let the phone maker offer a brilliant, user friendly piece of hardware with GPS, touch screen, accelerometers, etc. and then let Google provide the ultimate OS. As soon as the carriers get into the mix they will want to mess with the Android Software stack providing a load of needless carrier tie-in services. This is where Apple gets it right. They made a deal with AT&T but didn’t allow any carrier customization. This lets the user end up with a clean user experience on the phone.

Will Google attempt to provide the same kind of lobby with the carriers and the mobile phone makers. In my mind to deliver a clean user experience Google will somehow need to control certain aspects of the user experience on the device.

Next the carriers will destroy the application update experience. Traditionally, the carriers have not wanted to loose control of the device software stack. Will they really allow end users to download and install applications from a Google Application store? Will they want to provide their own stores, with applications they have vetted? Will the carriers feel like they are on the hook to provide tech support when the end user downloads an application and breaks the device? Complex questions. In my mind this is why Apple is maintaining tight control over the application store.

The tight end user experience we saw in the Google I/O demos may never reach us as consumers. With the iPhone we can be assured that Apple controls the user experience. With Android Google is encouraging the Carriers to customize. A model which is broken in my mind.

I took this screen shot from one of the youtube demos posted by Google demoing the Google Android OS.

A couple of take awys I thought were important:

• The OS allows both multi touch input and traditional navigation using keyboards and rollerballs (like the blackberry).
• The OS has many of the features the iPhone introduced to us and in some ways has managed to improve on the iPhone’s design in a few key places. For example, street view allows you to rotate the device using the accelerometer / compass. Very cool.
• The home screen is a better design in my mind. It is like Google took a page from Apple’s spaces and brought it to the mobile device.
• Notifications are better managed in my mind. A big problem on the iPhone is the notifications pop up above anything else that is happening. How often have you received an SMS message while talking on the phone. Try hanging up the call… oh oh. Additionally, the notifications are in a list which allows you to work through them. Maybe a bit email’ish but at least you won’t clear that important txt message and then forget about it.

The big questions:

• Will Google find a device partner that can deliver a piece of hardware which is ergonomic and matches the great functionality of the OS with the device. Apple really gets this right.
• When will we see this kind of device in stores?
• And finally, how many phone companies will shut down their own OS development to compete. We have seen motorola struggle. Could this save them?

This will most definitely be an interesting area to watch.