7 ms·

Whenever I hear about MSFT, Nokia, or RIM struggling to catch up to the incredible lead that Apple has, I remember back in 2007 when Steve Jobs said basically "

Whenever I hear about MSFT, Nokia, or RIM struggling to catch up to the incredible lead that Apple has, I remember back in 2007 when Steve Jobs said basically "the iPhone is at least 3 years ahead of everything else in the market." It took about 3 years for most of the competition to catch up to what the iPhone launched as. Microsoft kept trying to ride the WP 6 train hoping the iPhone was going to flop and not become the next iPod. Eventually they had to do a major rewrite which put them a few years behind of iPhone. Oops. Blackberry Storm and Torch are both still below par and not even competitive against Android devices, let alone iPhone. Nokia never caught up at all with the iPhone. Similar story is playing out with the iPad. Android is catching up on hardware, but not software ecosystem. Maybe that will be different in a year, but the market could certainly shape up to be more like the iPod dominance of music players than the iPhone/Android dominance of phones. Windows 8 will launch when? 2 or 3 years after the iPad. Sound familiar? Blackberry Playbook is out, but that's such a mess it's not worth discussing. Steve Jobs was right back in 2007 and most of the market is still 2-3 years behind where Apple is.

wslh 15y ago
I was discussing the same thing with friends. It's impressive how a company have three years ahead of competition, more thinking that the money is not the problem. In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.
shareme 15y ago
you know most iphone fans do not understand android dev ecosystem..the reason why android is wining.. 1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms
- brk 15y ago
  Winning can be measured different ways. I've owned both devices simultaneously (recently switch Verizon HTC incredible to iPhone ). Android app store outright sucks. Many minor usability things on android are annoying. I don't think Android is 'winning' but I do think they are shipping a lot of handsets. IMO there is a distinction. Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?
  - checker 15y ago
    "Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?" I want to use that. It's applicable to more than just phones and cars.
  - programminggeek 15y ago
    >Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive? Haha, I used a similar metaphor and posted at almost the same time. Great minds think alike?
  - WALoeIII 15y ago
    The important metric is dollars. According to a random internet article, iPhone accounts for less than 3% of phones shipped, but 40% of the profits. iPhones make more dollars. edit apparently Apple's mobile market share is up to 4% with more than 50% of the profits.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive? Which would you rather buy? And this is important, with things like the $350 Vizio tablet. Bentley's are nice, but I wouldn't buy one. And given this is a dev focused site -- do you want to make accessories that work in Chevys or Bentleys?
    - YooLi 15y ago
      It depends. If the Chevy drivers don't buy as many accessories as the Bentley drivers do, you better believe I'll be selling to Bentley drivers. And if those Bentley drivers use their accessories more, all the better. There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
      - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
        In the U.S. Android web share overtook mobile iOS (including 10% iPod Touch, but not any tablet share) yesterday: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110616 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110... Globally it looks set to overtake in the next few weeks (it's a couple of percent above just iPhone, but 4.5% iPod Touch share keeps mobile iOS slightly ahead), though both are trailing Symbian by some distance on that global measure.
- programminggeek 15y ago
  Quite true. However, those things don't seem to matter as much with stand-alone devices that are sold sans-contract, such as the tablet market. Nobody could outmarket and outsell the iPod when they went head to head. Didn't matter if the device was cheaper or better, iPod outsold them. If the tablet market dynamics are similar, Android won't fare as well on tablets as it does on phones. Simply put, if the and Android tablet is the same price as an iPad, most consumers will buy the iPad. All Apple products are seen as expensive luxury goods. Nerds might disagree, but that's how people tend to view Apple. If you could buy a BMW for the same price as a Chevy, you'd probably buy the BMW. Most people would. Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
  - EwanToo 15y ago
    "Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less." Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
    - Steko 15y ago
      You're both half right. The thing to remember is it's limited on carriers because the overall supply is limited. Many people that wanted a new phone and might well have bought an iphone if it were available certainly walked out with the closest substitute: android phones. OTOH all indications are that when in stock the iphone kills android head to head. The conventional wisdom was that this happened on AT&T because if you were with sprint or verizon and wanted an iphone you left and went to AT&T. This again was half true. However the other half was that when the iPhone came to Verizon it killed Android head to head again.
  - dminor 15y ago
    "Went to the Verizon store to get an iPhone, and walked out with an HTC Thunderbolt. Pretty amazing phone!" - non-techy Facebook friend of mine a couple days ago.
- Steko 15y ago
  Android is not winning because of the ecosystem. The real reasons Android is "winning": (1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly. (2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%. Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address: WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world). Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them. RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2). Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product. So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
  - cageface 15y ago
    I think price is going to be key in the long term. Right now there's not that much difference in price between an iPhone and a comparable Android phone, but at the rate the hardware is improving, it will soon be possible to sell very capable phones at a very low price point. Apple is going to have a very hard time competing at that end of the market and, as usual, I expect the low end will eventually come to drive the high end.
    - Steko 15y ago
      "I think price is going to be key in the long term." I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
paul9290 15y ago
Lately I feel Apple is behind Google's Android. There are many decisions Jobs and company have made that for me has made Android look more attractive. I currently own an iPhone and have so for over a year now, but there are things I want it to do that it can not while Android can. When my contract is up Im getting a Nexus or EVO. I want to enjoy flash, i want to truly run apps in the background, i want the ability to have voice search on home screen via click of a button, i dont want to have to go through sync process when i connect iPhone ( i dont want to find out how to stop sync), I want Google's awesome built in GPS and I want the ability for more customization. Ive enjoyed my iPhone but playing with girlfriend's Droid X2 and her prior Droid Incredible just showed me Im on the wrong platform. Though Apple's customer service is almost unmatched - will miss that. They have hordes of cash now but to me with what I mentioned above maybe Apple is truly headed down and destined to repeat it's own history?
- ltamake 15y ago
  Agreed, iOS isn't perfect and other mobile OSes have features I want. Jailbreaking fixes that most of the time, but it would be nice to have those features without having to hack them onto the device. I don't think Apple is headed the way of 90s Apple. That was a disaster because Jobs left the company and left a bunch of clueless idiots in charge of everything. I'm sure Apple will decline, but I don't think 90s Apple will be back anytime soon. And even though you've probably heard this a million times, I'm going to type it: Apple makes features really nice. For example, they weren't the first with Cut/Copy/Paste, but they made it really nice and usable. That sounds really fanboy-ish, but it's true. Multitasking, notifications, even the iOS design itself.
- olivercameron 15y ago
  To each his own. I enjoy simplicity on my phone, excellent battery life, and the odd game, as such, I use an iPhone. It doesn't mean that either way is right, but it also doesn't mean that Apple is destined to repeat their failures. Bare in mind that although Android outsells iPhone's, Apple still has 40% of the profit of the entire smartphone industry.
  - 15y ago
code_duck 15y ago
Apple probably has the most experience creating top-notch interfaces of any company in the world. Added to this their experience creating leading edge consumer hardware, and how can Google or Microsoft, even less so Samsung, Motorola, RIM, hope to compete? Apple has at least one big advantage over any company I can think of. They do it all, and do it better than everyone else. Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows. I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.
- pedalpete 15y ago
  I think Apple's strength is more that 'they do it all' then 'they do it better'. We used to think that trying to do everything was harmful, and that you should stick to what you're good at and partner for the rest. I think what we are seeing is that Apple's ability to develop hardware and software in lock-step gives them the ability to release earlier than anybody else. Think about something like Windows 8. Microsoft develops it, shows it to manufacturers as it gets closer and closer to being completed, gets feedback and makes adjustments while manufacturers start designing for the new platform, then they finally get a 'release candidate' and finish of the hardware. Then who is responsible for marketing? Of course, RIM is also an end-to-end provider, but they haven't had the vision to lead. Lets not forget that all the manufacturers were showing tablets before Apple launched the iPad, but it took another year for non-Apple tablets to hit the market en-masse.
  - code_duck 15y ago
    They do seem particularly good at what they do, to me. Marketing, style of hardware design, hardware technical design and quality, user interface, stability, distribution, product timing, marketing strategy...
zyb09 15y ago
The root of the problem lies in the OS and their SDK. For a while BlackBerrys were the best platform to develop for. Symbian, pain is the ass. JavaME, even worse. WM6 was a little bit better, but it still was a pretty bad WinCE fork, with all the glory of the Win32 Api. Now along comes Apple in 2008 with an extensively documented SDK, that includes all kind of high-level APIs, and an IDE with tools, that actually work. This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with. Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android. RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work. Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work. Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.
- sethg 15y ago
  As I understand it, before the iPhone, the real challenge that cellphone app development companies had was negotiating with the carriers. Compared with that barrier, the pain of coding to a badly-designed API was not worth caring about.
Apocryphon 15y ago
webOS will have a resurgence. I wanna believe.
ghshephard 15y ago
There is a second element in the NOKIA/RIM/MSFT/AAPL/GOOG that I wish someone like Asymco or JD Powers would track - and that is "Consumer perceived value 1 year later" - I realize WP7 hasn't been out for a year yet, but most of the other platforms (is Nokia still a platform?) have, and it would be interesting to see if people still value their smart phone after the initial wow factor has worn off, or whether they have seen a decreased, or increased value. It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc... But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does. I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone" That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail. [1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-index/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-i...
- Steko 15y ago
  The best way to track "perceived consumer value 1 year later" might be to just look at ebay prices on 1 year old stuff.
  - Tiomaidh 15y ago
    False--price is largely dictated by what new users (who can't afford to buy a new device) are willing to pay, not what the seller (who used the device) wants.
    - dmerfield 15y ago
      False - price is determined by the intersection of demand and supply curves.
      - Tiomaidh 15y ago
india 15y ago
Have you seen Android 3? I have seen complete laymen choose that over IOS4.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

wslh 15y ago

I was discussing the same thing with friends. It's impressive how a company have three years ahead of competition, more thinking that the money is not the problem. In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.

shareme 15y ago

you know most iphone fans do not understand android dev ecosystem..the reason why android is wining.. 1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms

brk 15y ago
Winning can be measured different ways. I've owned both devices simultaneously (recently switch Verizon HTC incredible to iPhone ). Android app store outright sucks. Many minor usability things on android are annoying. I don't think Android is 'winning' but I do think they are shipping a lot of handsets. IMO there is a distinction. Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?
- checker 15y ago
  "Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?" I want to use that. It's applicable to more than just phones and cars.
- programminggeek 15y ago
  >Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive? Haha, I used a similar metaphor and posted at almost the same time. Great minds think alike?
- WALoeIII 15y ago
  The important metric is dollars. According to a random internet article, iPhone accounts for less than 3% of phones shipped, but 40% of the profits. iPhones make more dollars. edit apparently Apple's mobile market share is up to 4% with more than 50% of the profits.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive? Which would you rather buy? And this is important, with things like the $350 Vizio tablet. Bentley's are nice, but I wouldn't buy one. And given this is a dev focused site -- do you want to make accessories that work in Chevys or Bentleys?
  - YooLi 15y ago
    It depends. If the Chevy drivers don't buy as many accessories as the Bentley drivers do, you better believe I'll be selling to Bentley drivers. And if those Bentley drivers use their accessories more, all the better. There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
    - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      In the U.S. Android web share overtook mobile iOS (including 10% iPod Touch, but not any tablet share) yesterday: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110616 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110... Globally it looks set to overtake in the next few weeks (it's a couple of percent above just iPhone, but 4.5% iPod Touch share keeps mobile iOS slightly ahead), though both are trailing Symbian by some distance on that global measure.
programminggeek 15y ago
Quite true. However, those things don't seem to matter as much with stand-alone devices that are sold sans-contract, such as the tablet market. Nobody could outmarket and outsell the iPod when they went head to head. Didn't matter if the device was cheaper or better, iPod outsold them. If the tablet market dynamics are similar, Android won't fare as well on tablets as it does on phones. Simply put, if the and Android tablet is the same price as an iPad, most consumers will buy the iPad. All Apple products are seen as expensive luxury goods. Nerds might disagree, but that's how people tend to view Apple. If you could buy a BMW for the same price as a Chevy, you'd probably buy the BMW. Most people would. Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
- EwanToo 15y ago
  "Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less." Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
  - Steko 15y ago
    You're both half right. The thing to remember is it's limited on carriers because the overall supply is limited. Many people that wanted a new phone and might well have bought an iphone if it were available certainly walked out with the closest substitute: android phones. OTOH all indications are that when in stock the iphone kills android head to head. The conventional wisdom was that this happened on AT&T because if you were with sprint or verizon and wanted an iphone you left and went to AT&T. This again was half true. However the other half was that when the iPhone came to Verizon it killed Android head to head again.
- dminor 15y ago
  "Went to the Verizon store to get an iPhone, and walked out with an HTC Thunderbolt. Pretty amazing phone!" - non-techy Facebook friend of mine a couple days ago.
Steko 15y ago
Android is not winning because of the ecosystem. The real reasons Android is "winning": (1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly. (2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%. Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address: WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world). Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them. RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2). Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product. So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
- cageface 15y ago
  I think price is going to be key in the long term. Right now there's not that much difference in price between an iPhone and a comparable Android phone, but at the rate the hardware is improving, it will soon be possible to sell very capable phones at a very low price point. Apple is going to have a very hard time competing at that end of the market and, as usual, I expect the low end will eventually come to drive the high end.
  - Steko 15y ago
    "I think price is going to be key in the long term." I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).

paul9290 15y ago

Lately I feel Apple is behind Google's Android. There are many decisions Jobs and company have made that for me has made Android look more attractive. I currently own an iPhone and have so for over a year now, but there are things I want it to do that it can not while Android can. When my contract is up Im getting a Nexus or EVO. I want to enjoy flash, i want to truly run apps in the background, i want the ability to have voice search on home screen via click of a button, i dont want to have to go through sync process when i connect iPhone ( i dont want to find out how to stop sync), I want Google's awesome built in GPS and I want the ability for more customization. Ive enjoyed my iPhone but playing with girlfriend's Droid X2 and her prior Droid Incredible just showed me Im on the wrong platform. Though Apple's customer service is almost unmatched - will miss that. They have hordes of cash now but to me with what I mentioned above maybe Apple is truly headed down and destined to repeat it's own history?

ltamake 15y ago
Agreed, iOS isn't perfect and other mobile OSes have features I want. Jailbreaking fixes that most of the time, but it would be nice to have those features without having to hack them onto the device. I don't think Apple is headed the way of 90s Apple. That was a disaster because Jobs left the company and left a bunch of clueless idiots in charge of everything. I'm sure Apple will decline, but I don't think 90s Apple will be back anytime soon. And even though you've probably heard this a million times, I'm going to type it: Apple makes features really nice. For example, they weren't the first with Cut/Copy/Paste, but they made it really nice and usable. That sounds really fanboy-ish, but it's true. Multitasking, notifications, even the iOS design itself.
olivercameron 15y ago
To each his own. I enjoy simplicity on my phone, excellent battery life, and the odd game, as such, I use an iPhone. It doesn't mean that either way is right, but it also doesn't mean that Apple is destined to repeat their failures. Bare in mind that although Android outsells iPhone's, Apple still has 40% of the profit of the entire smartphone industry.
- 15y ago

code_duck 15y ago

Apple probably has the most experience creating top-notch interfaces of any company in the world. Added to this their experience creating leading edge consumer hardware, and how can Google or Microsoft, even less so Samsung, Motorola, RIM, hope to compete? Apple has at least one big advantage over any company I can think of. They do it all, and do it better than everyone else. Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows. I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.

pedalpete 15y ago
I think Apple's strength is more that 'they do it all' then 'they do it better'. We used to think that trying to do everything was harmful, and that you should stick to what you're good at and partner for the rest. I think what we are seeing is that Apple's ability to develop hardware and software in lock-step gives them the ability to release earlier than anybody else. Think about something like Windows 8. Microsoft develops it, shows it to manufacturers as it gets closer and closer to being completed, gets feedback and makes adjustments while manufacturers start designing for the new platform, then they finally get a 'release candidate' and finish of the hardware. Then who is responsible for marketing? Of course, RIM is also an end-to-end provider, but they haven't had the vision to lead. Lets not forget that all the manufacturers were showing tablets before Apple launched the iPad, but it took another year for non-Apple tablets to hit the market en-masse.
- code_duck 15y ago
  They do seem particularly good at what they do, to me. Marketing, style of hardware design, hardware technical design and quality, user interface, stability, distribution, product timing, marketing strategy...

zyb09 15y ago

The root of the problem lies in the OS and their SDK. For a while BlackBerrys were the best platform to develop for. Symbian, pain is the ass. JavaME, even worse. WM6 was a little bit better, but it still was a pretty bad WinCE fork, with all the glory of the Win32 Api. Now along comes Apple in 2008 with an extensively documented SDK, that includes all kind of high-level APIs, and an IDE with tools, that actually work. This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with. Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android. RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work. Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work. Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.

sethg 15y ago
As I understand it, before the iPhone, the real challenge that cellphone app development companies had was negotiating with the carriers. Compared with that barrier, the pain of coding to a badly-designed API was not worth caring about.

Apocryphon 15y ago

webOS will have a resurgence. I wanna believe.

ghshephard 15y ago

There is a second element in the NOKIA/RIM/MSFT/AAPL/GOOG that I wish someone like Asymco or JD Powers would track - and that is "Consumer perceived value 1 year later" - I realize WP7 hasn't been out for a year yet, but most of the other platforms (is Nokia still a platform?) have, and it would be interesting to see if people still value their smart phone after the initial wow factor has worn off, or whether they have seen a decreased, or increased value. It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc... But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does. I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone" That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail. [1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-index/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-i...

Steko 15y ago
The best way to track "perceived consumer value 1 year later" might be to just look at ebay prices on 1 year old stuff.
- Tiomaidh 15y ago
  False--price is largely dictated by what new users (who can't afford to buy a new device) are willing to pay, not what the seller (who used the device) wants.
  - dmerfield 15y ago
    False - price is determined by the intersection of demand and supply curves.
    - Tiomaidh 15y ago

india 15y ago

Have you seen Android 3? I have seen complete laymen choose that over IOS4.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]