A number of articles today (and in the past months) have been covering the release of the first Android-powered phone, how it compares to the iPhone, and how it’ll affect Apple’s presence on the mobile business. Personally, I think it shouldn’t be compared with the iPhone at all.
The new phone is appropriately called the T-Mobile G1 (I assume for “Google-1″) and I’m sure there was a huge effort put by both T-Mobile and Google Android developers to have it ready before the U.S. Holiday season.
There are obvious points of comparison between the iPhone and the G1:
- Both sport a touch interface
- Google has released an Android Application marketplace, much like the iPhone’s
- They are both multimedia devices with music and full-size internet browsing
But if you try to compare them side by side, I think it’s obvious that Google knows it couldn’t win the war with hardware alone since Apple is famous for putting out the most beautiful and well thought out hardware. Instead they’ve created a mobile platform to push their services out of the PC and into millions of mobile units; much more than Apple ever could. The reason for this bet? Android is open-source and can be installed in pretty much any phone.
If you watch this video, you’ll quickly see the reason behind it all. Notice how the applications work seamlessly and using what seems to be push technology, i.e. no syncing is necessary for the data to flow from the mobile device to the Google servers and back:
I own another phone from HTC, the manufacturer of the G1, and am very happy with it. It’s the T-Mobile Dash and it works with Windows Mobile. But outside of Outlook, I pretty much live my life in Google applications (Gmail, GTalk, Google Docs). How many really useful web applications does Apple have on the web? Zero. All their apps are desktop based (iTunes mainly and maybe Mail).
So I think it’s pretty clear who’s going to win this battle down the road. Google, as it usually does.
What do you think? Did Google really get it wrong this time?
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