2.1 was probably all that was available at the time that Samsung was developing the phone. Google aren't very open with development of future versions of Android.


It is supposed to be so that you can update the built in applications even if your phone vendor decides to no longer release newer firmware.


Doubt it.

People with phones with skins now can download and run as default any of a variety of alternative home/launcher apps. I don't see why Google's would be any different.

I was more thinking of potential issues with updating the launcher since if it breaks then people could end up with a non functioning phone.

Google already have issues with Android not being amazingly userfriendly. Mix in weird procedures to update your launcher and apps and its just getting worse.

If the update to Gmail breaks then the worst that happens is they need to reinstall and they can't access Gmail until its fixed.

I'm in a graph mood today it seems.

US sales of smartphones. These numbers go right to before the iPhone 4 release. Verizon's push of Android with their Droid marketing is clearly doing something, and was enough to push past the iPhone during the iPhones weakest 2 quarters. Will be interesting to see what Q3 and Q4 brings, since Verizon and the other carriers are filling each quarter with new Android devices, compared to Apple only updating once a year.

Which line is which there?
The two that end in 27% and 11% appear to be the same color. I'm assuming Android is the 27%?

33% is RIM
27% Android
23% iPhone
11% Windows
3% Linux (No idea what that means)
2% Symbian
1% Palm

Not a good colorblind chart, since they skipped showing symbols and didn't label the lines in the chart.

Observations: iPhone purchases likely decline as June approaches, due to the (pending) announcement of a newer model. This year there were a ton of leaks about iPhone 4, so I suspect the effect was even worse due to the mainstream coverage.

Android is not only featured in some marketing-heavy phones such as Verizon's Droid brand, but it's also quickly becoming the default OS on your run of the mill cheap go-to phone. The "smartphone" category is dead. It doesn't exist anymore. App phones, what we've been talking about, are simply on their way to becoming ubiquitous. With the iPhone stuck on AT&T there's simply far too much opportunity for Android to gain share against it, even if those gains don't come at the expense of iPhone unit sales.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with some phone producers once Windows Phone comes out. IMO, if I wanted to change my bottom line, I would not commoditize my product line further by making models running every OS. HP, for example, might be on the right track by trying to build WebOS and taking a pass on Windows Phone.

With Android, the skinning doesn't seem to be cutting it and I don't think it's going to get any easier for manufacturers to make their products distinctive without heavy carrier marketing blitzes. That's only going to lead to regional branding and continued high turn-over in models. Expect your new Android phone to have a lifespan of well under a year. I don't see most of these phones being able to take multiple full revision OS updates. At least they'll have the apps.

BTW, no one includes the iPod Touch nor iPad when they look at iPhone/iOS numbers. There's no iPod equivalent with any of the other OS platforms. If you're marketer or software vendor, that's very important to consider. I still think it's Apple's game right now, regardless of the most recent quarterly numbers.

===
EDIT: fixed a few grammatical errors, one of them quite important (re: "not" commoditize)

It makes no sense to include them since they are in different markets. Why would they combine the numbers for a portable music player, a tablet/net device and a phone?

Requoting Bruno, " If you're marketer or software vendor, that's very important to consider"

iOS and the devices that run it are one target for software vendors in many cases. A game doesn't care if it's a phone or not, and has a larger market to sell to due to the non phone iOS owners out there. Same for a majority of other categories of software. On the hardware side, vendors can (and do) make many accessories that work on any of the iOS devices.

Because at the end of the day market share is about dollars. And the fact the other companies don't recognize this is why they're all floundering and why some of them won't make it another 10 years in the business.

When you're taking into account "market" it's really about the platform, not about the specific device. When tallying Android numbers which devices do you pick? Do you pick only those with a cellular baseband? Must it support voice? The iPad has 3G service and you can run voip apps. Maybe its screen is too big? Do you include the Dell Streak? Do you include the Evo?

I'm not saying one should include the iPod (touch, not other models) when doing a simple phone-based chart, but rather that such a chart and analysis doesn't tell a story that's very significant. Everyone knows there's only one iPhone, so it's not going to be a big surprise that 30 other companies shipping phones with "Android" OS are going to eventually catch up. To me that doesn't signify dominance, it signifies how pathetic the rest of the industry is. It takes more than a dozen OEMs to even come close to match Apple's unit sales on a single SKU, while still not matching their profits. Pathetic.

As an investor it should be clear where to steer your money. As a developer it should be clear what platform to invest in.

I hate it when Bruno is 100% right

Bringing this back to an Android thread (there's an active iPhone thread, people ), have you formulated your final thoughts on the Captivate, Tom? I'd love to hear the positive points of your experience, as I don't believe that up to this point you've mentioned any

Droid and Evo have started upgrading to 2.2/Froyo in the last few days.

Not yet. I am still leaning towards not trying Android again for a while though, as I don't believe 2.2 will do anything to address my big negatives. I'll try to do the final writeup in the next few days, definitely want to get it done while the experience is fresh.

Tom, if you want to try out another Droid phone, apparently the easiest phones to get to stock Android appear to be the ones with Sense UI. It looks like it's trivial to turn off Sense and use the default Android launcher.

That only changes the launcher back and as the updates to the article mention, it doesn't work for all phones.

The rest of the phone will still have the manufacturer changes so you're not getting the stock Android experience.

True, true. Damn, this is becoming a definite problem for the platform. It's quite irritating, because although Android has its quirks (and I'm not saying it's totally ready for every consumer), I think it's a fine operating system. And for a user like myself, I'm absolutely loving it.

My HTC Desire upgraded to 2.2 OTA yesterday. Still crashes at least once a day, though

Android does or apps on it?

Okay, it looks like I've encountered my first, legitimately stupid bug in Android. I'd be grateful if other Android owners in this thread could let me know if this happens for them:

For those of you with more calendars in Google Calendar than just your base calendar: on your phone, please create a new even for a certain time in the future (say, tomorrow), and attribute it to one of your additional calendars (not the default one) while creating it.

After you've done that, please get on a computer and pull up Google Calendar and look at the appointment you just made.

If you're like me, then the appointment annoyingly shows up as an invitation, not just an event. It's a small thing, but it's driving me up the wall simply that it works this way. I don't want that little question mark sitting there, as it's distracting and it takes up space for the event description.

I can't do much with the invitation either. Denying it grays-out the event, making it less noticeable (which of course I don't want), and accepting it is the worst, as it creates a duplicate entry under my default calendar! I've actually taken to accepting the invitation, deleting the original, and going into the duplicate and changing the calendar it lives under. Clearly, this is not ideal.

I've been posting in a Google "Help" forum, which Google apparently has nobody looking at, and it sounds like this affects many different phones running more than one version of Android. It also happens whether the calendar you're adding to is shared with anyone or not.

I'd appreciate it if you guys could test this out and let me know what happens.

I'm really shocked that empeg owners are upset that Android is "the Linux of mobile." Just use it. You all "just used" your iPhones and got to know them. Try that same approach with your flavor Android. If it's not for you, try a different flavor.

I'm also surprised to see confusion about the Android UI. I was fluent with Android after 1 hour of using it in a busy Verizon store, and my only prior smartphone experience was the ancient Treo 650. I agree, Android is geeky and requires digging through menus. But, have we lost our geek edge and gone soft?

I've gotten non-techs comfortable with Android and its quirks. You just need an open mind.

While I mostly agree with the spirit of your post, I don't feel this particular analogy works at all. The barrier to trying out different "distros" of Android involves purchasing different phones and returning them, and even more difficultly switching between cell phone contracts.

And that's just the practical challenges. On top of that you have to deal with companies that just don't make software well at all (the phone manufacturers). It's not just that you have to get used to each interface, it's that often (especially on the Samsung phones), there's fundamental problems with the software (GPS doesn't work, broken PC syncing, etc).

I don't blame Tom for returning his phone. The UI that Samsung has put on there has been panned all over the place (except for Mossberg, I guess).

Exactly what Matt said. I don't have the time or desire to check out every flavor of Android out there. Could I get used to the quirks over time? Sure. But would I enjoy the experience more then my iPhone experience? No, not after what I saw with the Samsung Captivate after a week.

As for losing my geek edge and going soft, maybe, if you look at it that way. To me though, that says that geeks are only really geeks if they use a half baked product full of major issues that they have to work around or deal with, instead of buying a fully functional product that does what they need. Is Android half baked? For me it is, at least the Android as presented by Samsung and AT&T with the Captivate. I guess a geek is ok with GPS not working, or not being able to sync pictures of his family, and losing most of a battery charge in a day due to wanting to stay connected with friends.

And maybe I've been soft for a long time then. The empeg attracted me because it was a car stereo solution that did work properly, and had hackability under a polished usability layer. OS X attracted me for the same reasons, a very powerful core, and a very polished UI/Application framework. If I wanted half baked "geeky" solutions, I would have bought a Neo35 or gone the MP3Car route in 1999 instead.

My mind was open enough to try Android for a bit, and had the device actually functioned, the trial would have been for a full month. But I'll go back to my closed minded world of the Apple iPhone, where I get the geeky bits when I want them, but it doesn't interfere with my ability to get navigation directions to somewhere.

I am still slowly working on the writeup. Some people at work are also interested. Ultimately I still appreciate Android for being out there and providing competition. I'm just not a Google person it seems.

By the way, I have another app recommendation for everyone, and I wasn't sure if it was mentioned already:

Tasker

There are other apps that do similar things, like Locale. It basically gives you an incredible amount of condition-based control over the phone. The simplest example is that I can set my phone to go into silent mode at a certain time each evening and go out of it again in the morning. From there it gets really insane, really fast. This article did a better job of explaining everything it can do than I could.

*edit*
Example: I have the Nexus One dock and I keep it on my night stand. I created a profile that puts the phone on silent mode specifically when it's placed on the dock. That way it won't trigger when/if I plug it into a power chord anywhere else. I friggin' love this app. It's not free, but I think it's worth it.

Heh, exactly.

...or simply a micro USB cable plugged into one of those USB AC adapters.

I've also set up location-based events. Now, when the app checks in with GPS it detects if I'm at home, my mother's house, or my in-laws house. If it sees that I am, it turns on the WiFi, and turns off Bluetooth and GPS.

I recently started playing with the Prey Project, which now supports Android. Your phone (or laptop) pings a URL, either on the Prey Project's home page or on your own. If the phone gets a 404 error, then it starts generating reports with GPS and whatnot, and sends you email notifications. The whole thing is open source, free, relatively stable, and seems to work as advertised.

So...anybody with an Android phone tested the calendar bug I mentioned, and/or had the problem?

Ooo, I could try that new phone from Sony Ericsson on AT&T running Android. It's got one of them fast processors (a snappy dragon or something) a 4 inch screen, some gigs of storage, and ... umm, an 11 month old 1.6 OS...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/09/sony-ericsson-xperia-10-officially-debuts-on-atandt-130-on-contr/

I don't think I can express to everyone how frustrating this calendar problem has been. Google is deaf to the users in their "support" forums. I've brought up the issue in at least three Android user forums. I've sent the question to 2 or 3 Android blogs. I've emailed tech journalists. I haven't received a single response, even on any of the forums (now including this one).

I'll say this, the issue its self (events made on Android later appear as invitations) is a small one. It's still very annoying to me, though. But the bigger issue I see is that there's an obvious bug, yet Google has decided not to listen to user feedback. It continues to amaze me that in this day and age, with all the technology available to companies, and with an internet-centric company like Google, they still refuse to accept any feedback from the people who use their products.

I understand that the users don't always know the best thing to do. But how would it hurt Google to put one person on their own support forums to listen to users and respond to them, perhaps passing on obvious bugs like this to the appropriate team in the company? Every time I post on Google's own forums, I feel like I'm talking into a void. Do they really want their customers to feel like that?

Anyway, please, if you use an Android phone and you have a secondary Google calendar, could you please simply try adding an event to it on your phone, then check that event on your computer and see if it shows up as an event or an invitation? I would really appreciate it. Thanks.