Saturday, February 06, 2010
My Nexus One almost became an iPhone today
I woke up this morning and my Nexus One told me "I am ready for an upgrade". One click, a reboot, and I had a new phone.Google (or T-Mobile, who knows and who cares) pushed down an OS upgrade. All of a sudden, the phone is capable of pinch and zoom, the feature that made the iPhone famous. It is a new phone.
I know we are used to this market moving fast, but let me stop for a second and reflect on what is happening. Three years ago, I was used to phones that would live with a bug for their entire life. No bug fixing. Never. You had a problem, too bad. Buy another phone.
Then came the iPhone. Apple introduced a new concept for mobile. OS upgrades via the Internet (and a cable). It started with bug fixing and then they began pushing features.
Desktop OS had bug fixing for years, and they still do. However, you do not get features. In mobile, you do (for free).
Palm improved the process with over-the-air OS upgrades, similar to Android. No cable. It is like magic. Your phone transform itself. No need to click, download, plug. A few seconds later, the phone is new.
It will spread to desktop, simply because the OS are converging and the speed of the mobile market will take desktop with it. The iPad is the new desktop and it will have OS upgrades. So will Chrome.
Tomorrow, if Google and Apple get together, my Nexus One could really transform in an iPhone. A question will pop up, a click, and boom.
For now, the Nexus One is still far from the iPhone. Amazing technology, too many buttons. A geek phone built by geeks for geeks. Fantastic integration with Google stuff, in particular Google Voice, great camera, spectacular navigation. Still, too complicated to use, not intuitive, very hard to type on.
Pinch and zoom made it closer to the iPhone. One more software upgrade and it could pass it. It is not a dream, it is a possibility.
The mobile and desktop devices are becoming plain tablets, looking the same. What matters is the inside. And the inside changes while you are sleeping.
Get ready for a world of interchangeable devices.
Posted by Fabrizio at 06:51
6 Comments:
vittorioviarengo said...
It is indeed true that the on-the fly update is a great feature, especially for bug fixes. No question. But if you look at the reaction people have when the UI of facebook changes (or when you ship features in enterprise software patches), most people just don't like change that much. In fact, Apple keeps the main changes to the UI paradigm to major releases and these changes are typically incremental, that is they don't modify the interaction foundation (e.g. layering copy and paste on the existing OS). I have not tried the Nexus One, but if they are making this type of fundamental changes, it means they have major catching up to do. Good thing they they do it on the fly :)
Comment Posted at 12:14
Nokia has been doing OS upgrades for years, both over cable and over-the-air. Unfortunately the US carries rarely offer Nokia phones, so most people are missing out.
Comment Posted at 13:12
Pete Tyrrell said...
You make some good points on the positive side of the "easy upgrade". However, without stringent quality control, it could easily cause widespread pain if any form of bug/fault gets propagated.
Secondly, I find it interesting you are using an Android device (as I and many others are) yet Funambol still has virtually no support for this platform except for th community project which at present only supports Contact synchronisation.
Keep up the good work at Funambol.
Comment Posted at 16:43
Ugo said...
From the last post about the iPad:
"The device transforms itself in the object it becomes. It is a non-object."
And now about the Nexus One:
"Your phone transform itself. No need to click, download, plug. A few seconds later, the phone is new."
And the fact that physically those devices are just a screen helps to feel the magic.
Comment Posted at 18:15
Davide said...
Desktop OS had bug fixing for years, and they still do. However, you do not get features. In mobile, you do (for free).
Actually most Linux distributions had feature "push" for years!
Comment Posted at 17:02
...and now we also have the symbian os open sourced.
