How Android Phone Makers Are Missing the Marketing Boat 373
An anonymous reader writes "Why are Android device commercials showing giant robots and lightning bolts and not advertising features? Here is an interesting blog post of things Android device manufacturers could be doing to get ahead of Apple, but aren't." On a similar front, as a mostly happy Android user, I must admit envy for the jillions of accessories marketed for the iPhone, especially ones that take advantage of that Apple-only accessory port; maybe the Android Open Accessory project will help.
Re:Marketing and user experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I can do almost all of those things with Android, using Dropbox and Flickr and Amazon, but with Apple you can just turn on iCloud and you're done. No setup required. If saving $60/mo is a really important thing to you, then you're not Apple's target market. They sell to people who have plenty of money and don't want to have to think about their technology. And the iPhone 4S, despite lacking 4G, is in most ways the best phone on the market. When you get down to it, now that Apple stole the notification bar, the primary reason I still use Android is Swype.
Re:Marketing and user experience (Score:4, Interesting)
The morning of the iPhone 4S the news crew was out downtown talking to a new owner who waited all night for one. He was like "this Siri thing is cool" and asked the phone for the local weather, and it gave him the current time... on camera. That was pretty funny.
I've experienced the same thing with the voice control on my Galaxy S, so I stopped using it. It took longer to get it to do what I wanted with voice than to just type it in.
Re:Marketing and user experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple design is great until someone actually points out an Apple failure. Then the fanboys will try to talk around the issue, marginalize the problem, and marginalize those that are capable of seeing the problem.
I haven't found a perfect phone, computer, or operating system. Every one has its warts. I choose to use the ones which annoy me the least. These tend to be Apple products for things I directly interact with, and Linux (typically Ubuntu) or FreeBSD for things I don't directly touch.
Are there problems with Apple products? Absolutely. There are also problems with Windows and Linux. So I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
A shiny veneer is great, but some of us just want to get stuff done. Apple's designs aren't all they are hyped to be in this regard.
See, I guess I don't see that.
With (most) Apple products, I find that I spend less time trying to get my computer to work in a way that I can get stuff done, and more time getting stuff done.
Phone devices are a relatively cheap way to find this out for yourself. Hopefully Apple won't manage to litigate competitors out of the market.
Agreed. Without Android, Apple would likely still have a shitty notifications system. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to steal the best UI feature of Android. They might have come up with something as good. I doubt they would do better.
Competition is good, and the patent wars are patently absurd.
I went from a Windows Mobile phone to an iPhone, to and Android. Then I went back to iPhone. There are things about the Android that I loved--the reflowing text when you tap-to-zoom is fantastic. Far and away better than Apple, who only zooms to the DIV element (which might be too large to read, requiring pinch-zooming and then scrolling.) Though I never needed to use it, I like the ability to install third-party software (which isn't available on every Android device, by the way.) And Google had the cloud down long before Apple. The notifications were better than Apple's pre-iOS5. Both of these last two points are now addressed on the iPhone. I also loved that I could view an app manifest in order to know what kinds of things an app was going to have permissions to do, though this wasn't always completely helpful (full internet access was required to view ads--a fairly big permission to do a very common task.)
But ultimately, I felt like I was fighting my Android phone constantly. Scrolling was terrible--I would move my finger across the screen, and about a second later the view would scroll. Apps running in the background slowed my phone down constantly and drained the battery--I had to wipe the phone and install apps one by one until I found which one was doing it (the battery usage screen wasn't showing any third-party app as using a lot of battery.) People could never understand me on the phone--a problem I didn't have before or since (a different Android phone might have fixed that, but it's hard to shop for that particular feature and I don't want to have to return phones until I find one that is usable as a phone.) The mail client (not the Gmail client) was awful. Like something out of the iPhone's first release. I had far more problems with the market, which seemed to auto-update itself and often didn't show me accurate information. And don't get me started on updates. I was running a vulnerable version of the OS for quite some time before I finally rooted and used Cyanogen--more fighting with the phone. Updates to Cyanogen never worked right. Even when I managed to get the update installed, it often utterly killed my performance unless I wiped and reinstalled. Then I had to set a bunch of stuff back up--only some things would be restored from the cloud.
When looking for new phones recently, I realized that there's no coherence for Android devices. Every one is vastly different. On the one hand, this provides more choice. On the other, it's quite overwhelming