Android is going to be competing to Windows 7 Phone very shortly and in my opinion that is going to hurt it's growing process. The people that buy Apple products are going to by Apple products and those that don't buy Apple products are going to start to have some clear alternatives to Android. At the end of the day Androids growth has been off the back of Windows Mobile and not off of the iPhone. This is especially evident after Apple's earning conference that blew every analyst and expert predictions out of the water. I also disagree about the lower price point of Android phones, possibly in the United States but I can go and get a 16GB iPhone 3GS with a year contract for the equivalent of a dollar. It's a very level playing field outside of the United States, where the telecom situation isn't atrocious. A lot of people want to make that comparison because of how the PC-Mac war played out, but with Telecom subsidies it's a different playing field. I even believe that it's only a matter of time before that model is adopted with the iPad. Their biggest problem in my opinion is the lack of a cellular standard in the United States. If GSM was the norm in the United States then the iPhone would be on every network now like it is in Europe and Asia. Going forward that's the biggest problem. Do they make a separate model for a very limited market, Verizon? Or just wait for them to upgrade their network.
Well, Android is already growing fast. Traffic by Smartphone platform (via http://metrics.admob.com/): Code: iPhone Android Aug 09 40% 7% Nov 09 54% 16% Feb 10 50% 24% I don't see Windows Mobile 7 stopping that trend. It may slow it down a little, but ultimately, unless Microsoft gets some important exclusive partners, Win7 has no chance on mobile platforms.
One of the "Cautionary Points" this Wall Street Journal piece cites is Share Price, to wit, #3: "Apple's stock price has more than doubled in a year. Amateur investors say, "It's going up." Present tense. Serious investors say, more accurately: "It has gone up." Wait... this is The Wall Street Journal speaking here being cautious about a rising stock? Apple Inc. has a decade or more of performing well - demonstrated record of performance - and many see it as a bellwether indication of the IT industry so why is this at all a cautionary point? So successful has Apple been at delivering to its investors that now "serious investors" are concerned? Apple's retail business is booming and its on-line industry is one of the better performing areas... In what way is caution here appropriate? Certainly the stock is not overvalued and Apple's market share in information technology is only increasing! Such cautionary guidance might be more applicable to Microsoft...
Hopefully Apple approves this. Something that's way overdue, IMO. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ7xn86Zwyo"]YouTube- Wi-Fi Sync: Wirelessly sync your iPhone with iTunes[/ame]
Seems as if I have to backtrack a little on this. Apparently, HP wasn't really happy with their Slate and canceled the whole project. They didn't say why exactly, but there are probably two reasons: 1) The netbook architecture around an Intel Atom chip which apparently isn't able to compete with the iPad (especially in terms of battery life I would imagine). 2) The recent purchase of Palm With Palm, HP now has access to mobile technology and to Palm's WebOS, a worthy competitor to the iPhone OS and Android. The big loser is Microsoft of course who canceled their own slate-project while betting on HP. Now Microsoft is left without any high profile tablet PC in the pipeline. There will be Windows tablets for sure, but they'll be cheap knock offs. And in this lower price segment, there won't be much of a profit margin for Microsoft. Only four months ago, Microsoft hoped to be the technology leader and to soon dominate the new tablet PC market, now they're probably damned to being the 4th choice.
The Courier was also canceled. I'm a hard core PC fan boy when it comes to my primary computer and laptop, and it was excruciating listening to people argue against the iPad's iPhone OS, claiming that a full desktop OS was what was needed, and that the HP Slate with Win7 was going to kill it. A WebOS Slate on the other hand is intriguing and could be a worthy 2nd place tablet (don't really see anything taking over the iPad until the app markets on the other OS' are able to surpass Apple's app store).
So HP didn't wake up with a dead horse in its bed? Have y'all read the Apple vs. Adobe CEO verbal war? Seems kind of funny to me - I like how they both are naming Google at each other.
What funny is that Microsoft responded by... agreeing with Apple. http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-claims-html5-is-the-future-of-the-web-will-only-support-h264
I don't know how smart it is of Adobe to be putting itself in the hands of Google. The Android team will back Flash only in the hopes of having a killer spec feature which gives them a competitive edge against the iPhone. However looking at Google as a whole and you see that their business model is tied very closely to open source software. Adobe is going to find itself getting stabbed in the back when Google open sources ther video codec and adds it to the HTML5 spec. Apple won't hesitate to add support in WebKit, and Mozilla will finally get their viable alternative to h264 which they seem dead set against supporting. Adobe needs to regroup and expand on the Flash features that allow limited exporting to HTML5. Anything else is foolish in my opinion.
It was kinda amusing...I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. There are both technical reasons as well as strategic reasons for Apple to refuse Flash. And they're absolutely in their right to do so.
Apple sells 2 million iPads in first two months. Very impressive. At the same time, it's still not clear what Microsoft has in store when it comes to tablets (click), especially with HP backing off and switching to the newly acquired WebOS (click).