why not? It cost them just $22m and they have another potential competitor locked in
why not? It cost them just $22m and they have another potential competitor locked in
Get people on low end devices; either sell something for less than a low end Android, or sell something that does noticably better than a low end Android for about the same money. Sell a better device every year (os improvements, better CPU, more memory, whatever; just make sure people have something to upgrade too). You can sell some nicer models too, but push the low end ones. Price constrained users are a lot less picky, but can drive user numbers needed to gather developers, and developers are needed to get higher end users. Don't throw away the apis for every release, unless you really have to; especially don't call the new api 'universal' when it doesn't target older versions (which actually have users).
It's easier to go upmarket when you have adoption than to bring things down market (I think we're on Google's third try at Android for bargain basement phones, but it's hard to use mainstream apps unless you have multiple gigs of RAM)