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The value of Android's positioning isn't "open relative to Apple", although that's certainly a nice selling point as long as it lasts, but rather "open on an ab
by iigs 18y ago
The value of Android's positioning isn't "open relative to Apple", although that's certainly a nice selling point as long as it lasts, but rather "open on an absolute basis" in that the platform can be picked up by hardware vendors, modified, and used in their devices. Likewise individual technical users can suggest changes to things they don't like.
We don't know yet how it's all going to play out with regard to vendor cooperation (will HTC let us recompile the code for their phones? somehow I kind of doubt it, but we'll see), but in an ideal case it would be a platform for ongoing improvement and maintenance, changing the device upgrade landscape treadmill, possibly quite substantially.
- gamble 18y agoAndroid is no more open for handset manufacturers than Symbian, which has been around for years and is also open-source now. Even Windows Mobile phones have been seeing extensive customization lately - take the HTC TouchFLO phones, for example. Honestly, it could be argued that Android is less 'open' than its predecessors, since there's an assumption that handset manufacturers will take advantage of the UI Android provides instead of rolling their own from scratch. I suspect we'll see much more UI consistency with Android than has been the case with the older operating systems. As for users customizing their phones, there's nothing novel about that either. Palm and Windows Mobile phones have always let users install applications. In fact, you can easily run tethering applications on many Windows Mobile and Palm-based phones - just don't try it on the G1.