Android Loses

Seems like the iPhone HD (HVGA resolution times 4 whatever that’s called – 960×480) comes out this summer and launches on Verizon. The result? Android takes a hit. Look at the phones VZ is currently offering. They have nothing. That’s the only reason Android is doing well. WM is in a holding pattern. Palm is coming out but no one is going to buy that to any significant degree. You get a few random Symbian phones…Android is the only decent thing they have and that’s why they’re selling. When the iPhone hits, that’s all over. As for AT&T, similar story. The iPhone is clearly there already and there’s not much else. WP7 is intended to be a direct attack on the iPhone – an out of the box working experience. Android has the same problems that plagues WM. Phone to phone is a different experience and the stock UI is boring and uninspiring…thus the reason the companies need to make custom UIs to make up for it. Yup, exactly like WM. And I know we think that people like to tweak their phones, but we probably all know that it’s a short term thing and it get tiresome…at some point you want a working phone. The tweaking market is maybe 5% of the total market share. Long story short – By this time next year Android will be on the decline. And I’m not too convinced that Android is here. It’s 5% of the market or so…and a lot of that is Droid. It’s on VZ and Moto got f*cked by Google by advertising Android and then the Nexus came out. Moto isn’t exclusive to Droid in the end though and they are doing a WP7 phone. Droid will keep the ‘techie’ or ‘tweaking’ community, but hasn’t WM proven that this is just a sliver of the total market?

I’ll concede that WM is dying (despite buying an HD2 just days ago) but I think WP7 has hope. It has multiple form factors. It isn’t an Apple product (and yes, there’s a strong anti-iPhone community out there) and it has something the iPhone misses- integration. The iPhone needs 100,000 apps because they all do one trick. WP will be marketed as a high end device that has a ready to use, out of the box experience and the ability to have all of your contacts together, etc is very appealing and that’s something the iPhone lacks. No, people aren’t going to be so fast to ditch their iPhones, but WP7 comes out for the holidays- a time when a lot of contracts renew. The only contracts that renew summer time are iPhone contracts…but in the winter around Christmas there’s always a huge surge in advertising and sales, so it’s perfect time for them to make a hit out of a new must-have gadget.

Thoughts?