Of Androids and iPhones

Mar 28, 2008 at 8:06 AM
6 comments

Some of you tech savvy folks out there may have heard, a while back, about Google's entry into the mobile phone market, Android. Think of it, the notion goes, as a unified operating system which can be run on any compatible mobile phone hardware.

You might have also heard of this totally unpopular thing called the iPhone. It's Apple's one-widget-does-it-all-and-dammit-you'll-like-it mobile phone. It's hardware and software acting in perfect orchestration because Apple controls (some say with an iron fist) both sides of the equation.

Sound familiar?

It's just possible that many of the people reading this won't remember the mid 1980's with a view to technological advances.

There was this company called Microsoft, and they had an operating system which many of you have never heard of called Windows. In 1985, it was touted as being able to run on any compatible PC hardware. Microsoft didn't make the hardware, they just provided the operating system. Until the XBox, Microsoft's forays into hardware were pretty much limited to some really nice mice and keyboards (I'm sure better MS historians than I will tell me otherwise).

There was this other company, who, a year before, released an ugly little toad of a box. It had a 9 inch black-and-white monitor, a single, pitiful, 800K floppy drive (seriously? I have single images on my digital camera bigger than that), a keyboard, and this, well, I'll just have to call it a thing, called a mouse which it turns out they ripped off from Xerox. It also had an operating system that you didn't type commands in. You, like, clicked on these other things on the screen called icons. Crazy. Anyway, it was all produced by a single company, which you might not have heard of, called Apple Computer, Inc. The company later dropped the "Computer" part because they discovered they were making buckets of cash on iPods and this crazy iPhone thing.

Anyway.

The point here is, Microsoft's operating system became the most dominant operating system on personal computers, and Apple's computers became the system of choice for this sort of niche of iconoclasts.

Now, who are you going to bet on in the coming Android/iPhone war?

6 comments

Tags:

deja vu

Comments

Red Mosquito wrote:
Mar 28, 2008

I take you believe that Android will win. Which is probably true. But there are more competitors out there for mobile phone OS - like blackberry, palm, and Windows. I still think Apple and iPhone will hang around for a long time. Look at the iPod.

White Roses wrote:
Mar 28, 2008

Well . . . frankly, I don't know. Apple has a really freaking good widget. So does Blackberry. So does Palm. Windows Mobile Phones, I don't have any experience with, and I don't see them as often as I see people with Blackberries. Or iPhones now. The mobile space appears to be dominated by the widget makers (Nokia, Sony and Motorola all have their own OS, as it were, to go with their handhelds) and not any particular OS vendor. Based on Windows Mobile . . . I'd have to say right now the mobile OS vendor is at a serious disadvantage in this space against the widget vendor. But it was like that in the early days of personal computing. Commodore, TRS, Kaypro, they all had their own operating systems. Mobile Java seems to have some traction, but that's more like an app than an OS, in that it still runs on something else which runs on the hardware.

But I'm far from all knowing.

I just thought it was an interesting comparison, and something I will be watching with a certain amount of interest. The opening of the iPhone, somewhat, with the SDK Apple released is a development that most iPhone owners I know have greeted with open arms. Android has a lot of potential, though, without a lot of the baggage that Windows Mobile brings with it (to my admittedly biased eye).

As to the iPhone hanging around for a long time, well, since I'm sitting here typing this on the spiritual descendant of that Macintosh I was describing (new iMac, wheeeee), I'm the last person to think the iPhone is doomed. At worst, absolute positive worst, it'll end up like the Newton, used for decades past it's sell by date by a dedicated cadre of homebrew users. But I doubt it will come to that. In my dreams, I see an iPhone running a virtual Android, much like my iMac runs a virtual Windows when I need it.

Red Mosquito replied to White Roses’ comment:
Mar 28, 2008

Windows Mobile OS isn't that bad, I had it on my last phone. It works okay.

I can't wait for iPhone to open up more and have have more apps. Really, just more things to do with what I have. More camera features, maybe more email features, a real google email would be good, with threading.

I haven't owned an Apple computer in 24 years... (Apple //e)

White Roses replied to Red Mosquito’s comment:
Mar 28, 2008

Not sure how threads would fit in to their whole "nothing running in the background" philosophy. They say they're just trying to make sure that the phone still works as, you know, a phone. Who knows. Same philosophy they had with the Macintosh really. It needs to be something you don't think about, it's just there, doing it's thing, when you need it. High goal? Probably.