No One's Listening

Goodbye iPhone. Hello Android.

While not the iPhone killer, I think the Nexus One spells the beginning of the end for any type of SmartPhone dominance by Apple. Check out this consumer survey and how dramatically it changed in 3 months in Android's favor.

The real killer feature of Android 2.1 that this RedEye article failed to mention is that voice-to-text can completely replace typing on the phone altogether... and as far as I know, Apple has no plans to implement this feature any time soon.  Furthermore, while multi-touch isn't available out of the box, the hardware is multi-touch capable.  Because of the high demand, I figure it should will show up in Android 2.2 by the end of summer (knock-on-wood).

Here's the important point to take home, however: Android was designed by engineers and its open-source architecture means it has countless more developers contributing to its evolution than Apple's iPhone OS, which, coincidentally, was designed by marketers.  Here Apple is making the same mistake it did when competing with the PC in the 80's.  With dozens of companies creating Android-based hardware (actually forcing an even faster evolution of the software), there will always be a "latest and greatest" Android device available on the market every other month while the iPhone will lag behind with annual releases at best.

The competition to create the next great Android device also means their capabilities will leap forward much faster the iPhones which will be developed one at a time.  This also means that the price on Android devices will drop faster than Apple devices and you'll end up with the same thing you find in the laptop industry: Apples's $1700 Macbooks are stacked up against comparable Windows based systems going for only $700. I still can't believe people are willing to pony up that much extra money for something that marginally performs better.  Never underestimate the power of marketing and people's willingness to pay a high price just to look trendy.

The fact that the Apple's internal marketer-driven development process means locking the foundation of their devices to consumer's ever changing preferences today means that their hands are tied in evolving their products to meet the demands of tomorrow

These reasons and more are exactly why Android was able to go from a rumor to a crawl (the G1 launch), to a sexy device (the Droid), to what is arguably a better than iPhone piece of hardware (Nexus One) in a fraction of the time the iPhone has existed on the market.  With a few software updates, the Nexus One will be inarguably a better device than the iPhone, and much to Apple's chagrin, Google Apps are developing at a lightning faster pace than Apple Apps.  Oh yeah, and what a pain for Apple: The iPhone is still locked to the AT&T network for a few more months...

Also, don't forget about things like Google Voice, and Google's continued development and acquisition of VoIP capabilities (allowing you to place unlimited international calls for free with an unlimited data plan on your phone).  Or how about Google's quiet acquisition of the UHF bandwidth, giving them the ability to take on all the major telecom phone providers and their 3G/4G networks, leaving Apple and any phones they develop for the traditional telecoms in the dust?

Everyone's all excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet, but I'm afraid that about a dozen even better Google Android/Chrome-powered tablets will probably launch within enough time to take it out of contention before the device even catches on.

While Apple may have a slight lead right now, Google has way more under the hood and hasn't even begun to put the pedal to the medal.  The iPhone's days as #1 are numbered (I'm guessing in the two digit category), and Apple is going to have to make some drastic changes to its development model if it wants to catch up.  Apple's only real prayer at this point is that they can some how out market Google and its family of Android developers, thus doing what it has done in the PC/laptop market and get its drone-like Apple loyalists to stay tied down to an inferior product with a much higher price tag.

Welcome to the Google Age.