A Little Note About That Android Rant

Oh Mr. Simmons, you didn’t expect me to lie down and take that from you, did you? The once proud owner of BlownFuze has not just left Windows Mobile but he’s gone all Benedict Arnold up in here. But no, there will be no tarring, but it is fair to take a look at the rants of a man who has had too much Kool-Aid lately.

Let’s start with the great Nexus One. Man that thing is awesome…according to the blogs. In reality, this is the phone that’s sold less than the Palm Pre, a phone that’s considered a disappointment, and only sold 45% of what Google expected. This is the phone with an infamous 3G connectivity issue. This is the phone which came under fire for it’s questionable WVGA claims and has issues with black on white text. This is the phone that has infamous poor customer support that’s frustrated users. This is the phone with an unresponsive touchscreen, failed text messages and problems with the ambient light sensor. This is the phone that costs $529. And yes, it includes an SD card. Just like my HD2 except my card is 16gb and yours is 4gb.

But let’s get back to it. I know you love Google. All the great apps mentioned like Google Translate. I’m sure that’s used every day. Anyway, some of us don’t want Google all the time. We want things like Word and Outlook and Exchange and remote desktop. Google is fine – for some. But it’s hard to forget what they do. They give you software for free in exchange for your data which is what they’re really after. They want to know what you do, what you search, where you are…well, we remember when they had some privacy issues with Buzz, right? Personally, I’m fine paying a few dollars for a license to have software that’s built for its specific purpose and not designed to mine my data.

Speaking of software, glad you brought up the Android Market. We haven’t mentioned that since yesterday when MSNBC questioned Android’s Market. MSNBC stated “Wallpapers, ringtones, and glorified RSS feeds all boost the Android Market’s numbers, but offer little value compared to, say, a great utility app such as Locale. As with the iPhone, which hit the 100,000 app mark last November, it’s worth questioning how many Android apps are actually useful.” Their words, not mine…And that’s excluding the apps that are approved and contain malicious code.

On the hardware front, you’re missing an LED on your flash and I have over a half an inch on you…screen size that is. Yes, my HD2 is sweet and I love it. Know why? The same reason you love your Nexus One. A 1ghz chip hums. The WM lag is missing on your Nexus not because of anything spectacular other than a CPU that’s also available on WM. And everyone knows what happens when you don’t have a fast chip in Android…there are plenty of bad Android phones out there. Under spec’ed, too little hardware, too little support. And why? because you can put Google on any POS that you want to sell. There’s no minimum specs, no consistency throughout Android phones. UI’s vary by OEM. Some phones are ‘with Google’, others have Blur, others have Sense. In other words, it has all the issues that have plagued WM in the past and that’s why WP7 is changing that. See, if you can slap Android on anything and get different experiences phone to phone and even have different versions of the OS (while you wait for the OTA update to push) then you’re headed down the fragmentation that MS has learned from.

And I know how nice it is to not have to tweak a phone to death. My HD2 still has its stock ROM. I opened it, entered my Exchange info and logged onto Marketplace to get some apps like SkyFire back on my phone and haven’t done anything since. I haven’t even installed a registry editor. But I’m still watching everything out there, lying in wait. And I guess that’s why I love WM. See, I know where you’re coming from when you say that you don’t want to always flash and tweak. But please don’t tell me you’ve lost the desire to do it. If we stop exploring we may as well not have an open OS. In fact…all of your talk about the perfect OS you’re running, with the perfect apps and the perfect GPS, and the perfect screen…holy shit! Is it true? Is it you Mr. Jobs? Are you using an iPhone or just liberally copying from their playbook? Yes, love your phone, but when you consider marrying it then you need to put down the pipe and take a step back and remember why you started this whole thing…you got hooked by the ability to tweak, modify and make the phone your own and now you love the fact that the phone is perfect out of the box…just like them. Steve Simmons…I mean Doug Simmons, it’s ok to love your phone but it’s not ok to love it in that way. Now go get an HD2 for $175 less than what you paid for the Nexus One and you can stop having screen envy and have a few bucks ready to drop when WP7 hits the scene.

P.S. This is all fun and games guys…Simmons is a lot bigger than I am and he tracks me on Google Maps (why did I enable Latitude – the only Goog app I use??) so it’s just a joke…haha Simmons, right?:)