The Android Arms Race.

[Trashcooky]

Nothing new in this long article, but I enjoyed reading it anyway and I thought you might too.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/mwc-20 ... g-up/19949

[Charlie]

I really liked this bit

It’s bad enough that my blasted Samsung Galaxy Nexus — which, by the way, I’m finding its market-leading Android 4.0.2 plain-Jane Google Experience OS be buggy as all hell and am really aggravated that the promised bug fixes have not been released yet. Isn’t the whole damn point of buying a Nexus is that it gets the updates first?

This phone is only two months old and at least for the time being, is the company’s flagship phone on Verizon. But if MWC 2012 is any indication, it won’t be for long.

The stupid stock 1850 mAh battery on it is barely big enough to keep this dual-core 1.2 Ghz, 720p-capable phone running for 3 hours.

SEIDIO had to send me a monster-sized 3800 mAh battery pack so I could run it all day long in 4G mode. If I want to make it go for longer than a day, I have to set the phone to CDMA/3G. And now Samsung wants to make a phone with more than double this phone’s specs using current battery technology? Are they insane?

So if you think things are bad with the Nexus not being updated and being a total power hog, imagine what these gazillion other Androids coming out are going to be like. How can these vendors hope to keep them all up to date?

They won’t, and they can’t. They don’t have the discipline to keep them all updated over the course of your wireless contract and they really couldn’t give a damn about you after you’ve bought it.

and this->

If you think things are nuts now, just wait another week until Apple announces the iPad 3 or whatever it ends up being called. Then the Android tablet arms race will have to scramble escalate even further to attempt counteract that problem. Which they will all fail to do.

And by September of 2012 when iPhone-whatever-number-they-call-it is released, they’ll have to scramble to boost specs even further. Sadly, they won’t do it with innovation, superior customer support, solid build quality and product refinement, which is what they should be doing.

[Astro]

@Trashcooky - good find!

It helps put SO's position into perspective... maybe, we're in an age where the ferocious pace of development forces vendor attitude to be (has to be!) 'flog it', 'forget it', 'move on to the next new thing'.

Possibly, those of us who expect product support and development, need to wake up to a new world order... everything is disposable, don't bother with development, the new next best thing is just around the corner!

Excel

[Trashcooky]

The intervention by Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile and digital content, follows a bizarre incident last week when Acer, the Taiwanese manufacturer, invited journalists to a news conference to demonstrate a new smartphone for the booming Chinese market, only to tell them the event been blocked by Google.

The handset was due to be the first to run Aliyun, a mobile operating system developed by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant.

It emerged that Acer pulled out when Google threatened to revoke its membership of the Open Handset Alliance, the group of Android manufacturers that guides development of the world’s most popular mobile operating system.

Although Android is free and open source, allowing anyone to copy and adapt it, a condition of membership of the OHA is that handsets based on elements of the software must be cross-compatible and able to run the same apps. If Acer was kicked out, its future products could not carry the Android logo and would not have access to the Google Play app store.

“While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem,” Google said.

[BobC]

I really liked this bit

It’s bad enough that my blasted Samsung Galaxy Nexus — which, by the way, I’m finding its market-leading Android 4.0.2 plain-Jane Google Experience OS be buggy as all hell and am really aggravated that the promised bug fixes have not been released yet. Isn’t the whole damn point of buying a Nexus is that it gets the updates first?

This phone is only two months old and at least for the time being, is the company’s flagship phone on Verizon. But if MWC 2012 is any indication, it won’t be for long.

The stupid stock 1850 mAh battery on it is barely big enough to keep this dual-core 1.2 Ghz, 720p-capable phone running for 3 hours.

SEIDIO had to send me a monster-sized 3800 mAh battery pack so I could run it all day long in 4G mode. If I want to make it go for longer than a day, I have to set the phone to CDMA/3G. And now Samsung wants to make a phone with more than double this phone’s specs using current battery technology? Are they insane?

The whole thing about battery capacity takes me back 30 years or more when I was active in Amateur Radio. I went to a lecture at Lancaster University about the design of portable transceivers. The bit I still recall is that we were told to design based on the battery - the size and capacity of that was seen as the essence of portability. A box with no juice is as much use as a brick (and back then even heavier).

It looks like Samsung are relying on the network being "strong" to minimise the power used by the Nexus and so claim longer battery life, o.k if you stick to cities but bad news for folk out in the country on the edge of cell coverage.

BobC