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I agree, but for entirely different reasons. Android will win for one reason alone: China. There are 900 million people with cell phones in China. It is curren
by ryanlchan 16y ago
I agree, but for entirely different reasons. Android will win for one reason alone: China.
There are 900 million people with cell phones in China. It is currently and will continue to be the biggest cell phone market on the planet. However, the market's fragmented to little bits; shanzai phone here, nokia there, motorola sprinkled in between. But there are two driving forces common to all of the successful phones in China.
1) Price
2) Adaptation to local needs
Shanzai (unbranded local phones) came out and took massive market share by having an almost immediate feedback loop with which to respond to customer demand. Want two sim chips? You got it. Want a phone so loud it turns into a boom box? We can do that. Can you imagine Steve Jobs making these concessions?
MediaTek is cranking out Android capable SoC that bring the price of a smartphone down to $150 - unsubsidized. This is a price level that allows Android to go Shanzai - a very scary proposition for any large handset player. What now separates these 'low end' phones from the high end? They're not perfectly designed by Jonathan Ive, they're not super intuitive, they're not 4g, but they're good enough for China. Remember how Flip came out and just decimated traditional video recorders? It was good enough. MediaTek's $150 android phones are good enough.
If you really want to put the nail in the coffin, realize that if they're good enough for China, they're probably good enough for Africa, for South America, and beyond. The iPhone might retain the high end crown, but Android will undoubtedly become the dominant global smartphone platform.
- martythemaniak 16y agoAlmost all arguments on HN on this topic are ridiculously US-centric. As you can see from other comments, people wonder how the iphone can be "expensive" when it's "$199" vs "$179" for the Samsung Galaxy S. HTC sent me a free Tattoo last year - 2.8" resistive screen, 340x240 resolution, slow processor etc. Any iPhone user (including myself - I kept on using my 1st gen iphone) would have snubbed this crummy phone, except there's hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world who'll have phones like this as their first smartphone.
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoI just bought a £100 (not on contract) Android that blows away my iPhone 3G. I wasn't really expecting it to, I bought it as a stop-gap while I waited for the Nexus S and heard it was a good developer friendly device for the price but it's surpassed my expectations greatly. Related to the grandparent, this phone (Orange San Francisco) was made by ZTE, the Chinese telecoms giant who I've heard were originally blackballed from the Open Handset Alliance because HTC etc. were worried that they would provide too much price competition.
- alanh 16y agoHow does Android domination in China lead to domination in American and European markets? For that is what’s needed to “win,” otherwise here there will still be a split market.