Android

Anyway, it's a mistake pit Google against Apple. The real battle will be between Google and Microsoft for the exact same hardware manufacturers and sales channels. (Meanwhile, you can buy an iPad from an Apple Store or from Walmart without any carrier involvement).

Google hasn't managed the fragmentation problem very well, they haven't done enough to control the quality the Android OS between carriers and manufacturers, and they've utterly mismanaged the Android Market. I'm no fan of Microsoft or WinMo 7, but I expect Microsoft to do a much better job at addressing all of those issues.

Microsoft can also leverage their Zune desktop software.

And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. I've done some work with WPF and I found it very impressive and I would expect their Phone SDK to be of similar quality. On the other hand, even though I generally like Java I'm finding the move from iPhone development to Android development to be a depressing step backwards both in terms of the dev tools and especially the SDK.

Then again, it is Microsoft we're talking about. It may take them another 3 or 6 years to get it right.

Yes, very popular with .NET developers. That's the problem with Microsoft, everything is coupled together and isolated from anything non-Microsoft. You're usually either a .NET developer or an everything-else developer. Everyone else has free development tools/environments. Everyone else has vibrant online communities. Everyone else shares and collaborates with open source projects (strategically at least).

All true, and still they've had great success. (I'm actually surprised, given how bad the Market is and how blatantly the carriers are screwing up the phones). Which just means they can do even better if they can address those obvious problems.

On the other hand, even though I generally like Java I'm finding the move from iPhone development to Android development to be a depressing step backwards

It was the opposite for me. Between getting rid of header files and manual memory management, and having the app run right away on my phone rather than futzing with certificates, I'm enjoying Android development much more.

Note that I'm not complaining. Apple is free to price their goods however they want, and if they can price the iPhone at a massive premium and still sell tons, that's great for them. I'm sure other phone makers would love to have similar margins.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/apr10/04-27msh...

[2] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-6177381.html?part=rss&t...

[3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/lg-microsoft-l...

[4] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870385920457552...

Also, “everything is coupled together” occasionally becomes a feature.

However, what do I know — I haven’t ever used a Microsoft OS on a computer I control. .NET seems nice, though.

I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone (pays Apple $400 per phone sold), which the do for the privilege of exclusivity, among other reasons. When/if that exclusivity dies, we'll see if carriers will pony up. The alternative is more expensive iPhones or reduced margins (will Apple be willing to accept the latter?).

No more than any other device. By all reports, the iPhone is not significantly more expensive to build than comparable smartphones, and in fact if you look at similar smartphones, both subsidized contract prices and unsubsidized prices are very similar to the iPhone as well.

Android is going to open the market for cheaper, low-end smartphones, that's for certain - but comparably equipped smartphones, whether they be Nokia, Android, or WinMo7, are all in the same general price point.

I'd argue they haven't. The success would've been the adoption of the platform - but as far as I can see none of the major Android phone vendors actually support the platform - they see it more as a way to skimp on software development costs, and offload it onto Google instead. There's little to no interest in even updating the phones, or supporting the platform as a whole.

I feel that Google has been taken for a ride by Motorola, HTC, et al - there's a lot of lip service paid to Android, but none of their actions have helped solidify the platform, instead being treated simply as free code. The fact that there are a lot of units of hardware moving off shelves means little, IMHO, for the long-term success of the platform.

(Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)

Android phone vendors save a lot on the development of the system because Google and many others paid for it. And frankly, based on the make of the majority of Android phones, I don't think they spend as much as Apple on the design part either. That might explain the 20~30% "premium". You get what you paid for.

Remember those graphs of user's current phones related to the next phone they bought? Apple users were happy to continue with Apple, and even BB users wanted iphones.

That's fair play tho' - Google sought to commoditize handsets.

(And actually Apple spends stunningly little on R&D compared to it's peers. There was a rather nice graph about this that I can't find, but e.g. Microsoft and Nokia spend an order of magnitude more on R&D than Apple does, while seemingly getting just a fraction of the results.)

Locked,subsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 199 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF / month Locked,subsidized Galaxy S: 1 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF /month, but with the monthly fee waived for 3 months (so basically 350 CHF cheaper)

Unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 769 CHF Unlocked, unsubsidized Nokia N8: 519 CHF

At best you could argue (like the standard Windows vs Apple arguments) that if you start with the iPhone and then try to match most of its features then you'll end up paying the same. More likely you're still paying up to a third more, though this may be mostly hidden by US carrier billing practices.

Of course if you start with a cheap Android phone like the ZTE Blade then you'll simply not be able to match it on price. Nor if you choose an Android phone with a 5" screen or hardware keyboard or HDMI out will you be able to match it on features.

Note the contradiction between the two common claims that a) the iPhone isn't more expensive than alternatives and b) Android is only gaining marketshare because of Buy-One-Get-One-Free deals.

Google has had great success, which is good to see.

"Which just means they can do even better if they can address those obvious problems."

Not necessarily. If all these people are just buying android phones because they can not get an iPhone, then nothing Google does will change that. The real test will be when the iPhone is available on more carriers, and when people need to upgrade there Android devices, and stay with Android. It is just too soon to tell, so far.

My take on the R&D thing: Yes Apple is likely to be the largest tech company to spend least on R&D, but they have a much smaller range of products and market share to recover that cost. Also I was talking about the smart phone for that. Nokia and Microsoft don't make Android phones. They cannot take the free ride on Google.

On the other hand Ruboto[1] looks very promising, it's a project that brings JRuby to Android application development.

[1] http://ruboto.org/

http://beust.com/weblog/2010/05/22/more-on-android-and-the-i...

Android is already #2 and poised to become #1 in the next three years. Apple and Microsoft will soon not even be in the same league.

Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy.

My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling.

Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.

Then they try and develop web technology, Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it. You can't author anything for it when using Apple and Linux doesn't even get a runtime (Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete).

Apple doesn't seem quite the same. A lot of Apple developers are active in other developer communities. Microsoft developers seem to stick to Microsoft technologies. Perhaps this is because Microsoft has their own implementation of almost everything.

If you want to sell an Android handset... you have to pay Microsoft.

They're pretty direct about their legal strategy.

This is true for all mobile platforms. People change their phones often and have few true dependencies on the underlying OS. RIM might be the "dominant smartphone" at the moment but I doubt they're feeling super comfortable.

This is more to do with Flash being a defacto standard than anything else. I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux.

Heck, they finally decided to start porting Flash to Linux because of competition with Silverlight.

> "Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete"

Of course Mono counts, and compared to open-source Flash clones, it is in a far better shape.

Until you see those WinMo 7 phones in the wild, I would withhold judgment if I were you.

And you know what, it is also typically of Microsoft to fuck WinMo 6.x users and developers with something totally incompatible and no upgrade path.

http://swisscomonlineshop.sso.bluewin.ch/onlineshop/Pages/Pr...

Apple have done a great job of outdating the old sdks, mainly through the method of dropping simulator support for the previous sdks and no legitimate route of running previous firmwares on an iPhone other than holding them back (obvious flaw in this plan, how does a new developer acquire an ipod running 2.2 or 3.0)

Android on the other hand has had no where near this rate of attrition of the previous sdks with only really the initial release not being heavily supported.

However Android suffers from the problem you are not just waiting for Google to update the firmware so you can't make your app 2.0+ only in the thoughts that if users want my app they can update their firmware, this step would remove a lot of htc, sony and other phones that do not currently have the ability to run a 2.0 firmware whilst still being a very comptent phone.

As for the carrier "enhanced" firmwares....

Hard to forget it when it won't go away. No 64-bit plugin, no accelerated video. (Their explanation that there are too many video acceleration APIs was pretty weak: if they adopted one, it would become the standard.)