Avoid the Droid

For those of you sitting on a fence deciding whether to get an iPhone or an Android, today there was a very interesting article on SFGate. I pasted it below.

My favorite quote:

So when users buy an Android phone, what will they get? That depends. How will they get new apps? That also depends. Will those apps work with every Android phone? Probably not.

If you're already on iTunes, there's no reason to downgrade to the Android market. You'll have to reorganize your music/movies and rebuy/download all your apps. The simpler way is to just have one iTunes library for all your media that you can distribute seamlessly across all your Apple devices. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. I can't understand why anyone would want to fragment their media into another marketplace, another file system, just to save a few bucks on that buy-one-get-one free Motorola. But of course if I'm talking to a peecee user, you're already use to doing things the hard way for the sake of saving a few bucks. Carry on, my tortured friend.

All the goodies you get with iOS like Facetime, Airplay, and Airprint, you won't get any of that on a droid, sorry. And don't just take my word. I have a reader who recently swapped her iPhone 4 for a work-issued Sprint EVO. Now she can't sync her iPhoto, music, nor share games with her son, or do Facetime with her iPhone-toting hubby or her iPod Touch. The EVO is chunkier but yet the battery life can't even last a day. Go figure.

And I have another friend who opted for a cheaper Droid only to lose all its photos forever for no reason. Fact is, no mobile operating system is as stable, unified and mature as iOS. And no app store has as many offerings as the Apple App Store. Did you know J.D. Power rated Apple highest in smartphone customer satisfaction four years running?

Spend a little more on an iPhone now, and you'll get it all back when you resell it. Remember, with Android, you'll only get what you deserve.

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Amazon's Android Store Will Make Android Even Messier

Amazon's Android app store, which the company opened to developers this morning, will offer a better experience than the current Android Marketplace run by Google. Apps will be vetted by Amazon (much like Apple does with iTunes), which will get rid of a bunch of crummy apps that don't work right or feature unsavory content like porn.

That's good news for Android users, right?

Not necessarily. Having separate app stores for the same platform contributes to the biggest problem facing Android: fragmentation into a bunch of slightly different platforms, each offering slightly different experiences and supporting different apps. That's not a smooth user experience.

Users have already seen Verizon swap out Google search for Bing search on some phones, and Angry Birds developers Rovio have complained that the app doesn't work as well on some older versions of the platform, forcing them to build a "light" version. Android tablets will require powerful hardware, which means that apps which run fine on them might not run at all on earlier smartphone versions of the platform.

But the problem could get much worse from here. As developer Kevin Marks explained on his blog yesterday--and TechCrunch elaborated on--there are actually two Androids. Most popular Android phones are certified by Google and come with various Google apps built in, such as Gmail and Google Talk. But there's also the underlying Android operating system, which is open-source and can be customized by phone makers, carriers, and even Google competitors like Facebook.

As third parties build more customized phones on Android, expect more unique apps to emerge for each platform--imagine Zynga apps built for a Facebook Android phone, or a specialized Motorola app for backing up music and video, for instance. Amazon's Android app store will be a perfect venue for apps that Google might otherwise not highlight.

So when users buy an Android phone, what will they get? That depends. How will they get new apps? That also depends. Will those apps work with every Android phone? Probably not.

In 2010, users didn't seem to care, and bought phones based on Android anyway. But as the platform fragments further in 2011, that could change.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/05/businessinsider-amazons-android-store-will-make-android-even-messier-2011-1.DTL#ixzz1ABakENxT