Android and iPhone (again)

When Google announced its entry to mobile OS, iPhone was ruling the smart phone market. Windows mobile OS was looking like a bad version of its own Windows 95. Nokia, Sony and Motorola never got hold of the idea of mobile OS.

The mobile phone industry can be easily divided into pre and post iPhone. iPhone changed the way everyone looked at mobile phones. It was calculated growth from iPod to iPod touch to iPhone (although Steve tells iPhone was invented when they wanted to build Apple TV).

Microsoft kept promising that it would come with better mobile OS. HTC built the required hardware. But Windows was not ready to leave its cumbersome start-folders-sub folders idea.

I became interested in the idea of smart phones only when 3G became more widely available in the UK. The Nokias etc were also offering Internet, but the Internet experience was no where near to the desktop experience.

During same time, social networking websites started making big waves. Orkut, then Facebook. Twitter entered. Flickr grew. You tube became social networking video channel. The way we looked at Internet changed forever. The chats, forwarded messages, sending bulk photos to bulk of friends all stopped.

Most importantly, Google gave its next best service, GMail (the first best is still its search engine). GMail changed the way we all worked on e-mail. With one account name and password, we could manage our emails, calendar, photos (Picasa), tasks (Google tasks). Google reader became smarter and quicker.

The market was really looking for competition for closed brand iPhone. Google entered the market with Android OS. As they gave all other previous services free, they made Android open source.

When T-mobile announced first ever Android device, I jumped and grabbed it. It was far more cheaper than iPhone, far more better than Windows OS. It did every job iPhone did. For people who use Google for everything (GMail, calendar, contacts etc), all information was automatically stored in cloud. No need to worry about connecting to the desktop every evening to sync all the data. No need to have a media player to put all the songs on to mobile. It was pure copy-paste business. Very simple and straight forward.

But still it was not iPhone in terms of looks and speed. But it did multitasking, that is why it was slow. The Android market grew day by day. The android went from version 1.0 to 1.5, then to 1.6.

When my contract was about to end, I went for HTC Desire with Android 2.1. The hardware and Android OS have leaped at least 10 folds. I got this for £30/month contract of 24 months with no upfront charge for the phone. When I am writing this, we still have to pay for iPhone if I want such contract.

I never liked Adolf Hitler. Although I very much appreciate the leadership skills of Steve, I will probably never buy an Apple product. I will leave Apple to Americans, or so called brand conscious people.

My single line review about HTC Desire with Android 2.1 is, “Stop comparing Android with iPhone. Now start comparing iPhone with Android”. With version 2.2. on way, I am much more excited about Android.

(image courtsey: http://davidjacobchemla.wordpress.com/. I have not taken permission to put the picture. Thank you David.  I hope David Jacob does not mind it. I you do mind, I will remove the image)