Friday, October 31, 2008
When Android beats the iPhone
Today I discovered two reasons why Android might beat the iPhone, eventually. One, it is open source (ok, I am kidding, I did know that before ;-) Two, it has OTA firmware update.As you might recall, I complained about the email client on the phone. Not the Gmail one, the other one. The POP/IMAP client. Apparently, I was not alone. Pretty much everyone has been complaining about the connection error I have with POP. The Tmobile support forum currently shows 229 messages on this topic...
Bottom line: T-Mobile botched this one. Google could not care less (Gmail works nice) but the mobile operator should have been more careful. People are returning the device to the store, because there has not been a fix (yet).
Why does open source help? Well, on the Android Market a new email client appeared a few days ago. It is called K9. It is a fork of the original Android client (which is open source). It has more features than the original one and, not surprisingly, it fixes the issue above.
This is great. A week or so ago Google was alone in developing Android. They made it open source and boom, an internal application is getting perfected by the community. End user benefit from it immediately, because they can download it for free from the Android Market (which is such an easy task to do). The OS allows you to define a default email client, so you are good to go.
All this, without any intervention of Google or T-Mobile. The community fixed the issue for T-Mobile... You have to love this one if you are a mobile operator.
What would have happened with the iPhone? Probably, Apple would not have released an application that buggy in the first place, but... you would have had to wait for the next firmware update. Hoping the fix would be added (and, believe me, I have been frustrated by the lack of copy&paste in the iPhone for 18 months and there is no fix in sight...). You do not have to rely on Apple. You can rely on the community as well.
When it comes to firmware update, here is a good one. Android does it over-the-air (OTA). You receive a message, click on it, wait a few minutes and your are done. No iTunes, no cable. Pushed to your phone. At the moment, it is a bit random (some got RC29 already, some did not) and they should make the process more transparent. But it is a great innovation over the iPhone.
Nice to see Apple has to catch up, once in a while...
Posted by Fabrizio at 13:12
5 Comments:
Antonio LdF said...
This is the real plus of the gphone, but I hope that google will not obstruct the applications that use other mail/calendar/document/browser services.
In an open source phone I use the best application, not the producer application!
Probably they are intrested only on the user's activity information on the phone.
Anyway..great news!
I follow you da tanto tempo e ho visto la tua video intervista al frontiers of interaction di quest'anno.
Bravo!
Comment Posted at 07:00
Fabrizio said...
Ciao Antonio,
the way Android is built, every application is the same. It is in the operating system. If you build an email app, you can tell it to "listen" to any call for an email app. The user is able to choose which email app to use, and if s/he wants can make the other email app the default.
capo
Comment Posted at 07:48
Michael Martin said...
What do you think of the upcoming January OTA update from the CupCake track which will include video recording, stereo bluetooth, and the ability to add an onscreen keyboard among other improvements?
,Michael Martin
Google And Blog
Comment Posted at 17:22
use pastebud to copy and paste on a iphone/itouch
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