I've always found raw naked Android much nicer to use than the silly re-skinning every manufacturer wastes time adding. Sense and blur are bad, but Sony's Timescape was absolutely the low-point.
One thing I learned from HW manufacturer is that they absolutely don't get SW development
Zero, zilch, nada, NULL
Hence, this results in wasting (a lot of) time with BS projects, lots of NIH syndrome, design by committee, etc
I've heard and seem a lot of stories, I've worked in certain companies and I vowed never to work again there.
They waste million of dollars thinking CrapCase and other "irrational" tools are ok.
And that's why Cyanogenmod releases upgrades quicker than the manufacturers.
For you. For AT&T, it says they can come into your house and take any and all children of yours whenever they want. They wrote the contract and you have no choice but to agree, so they're certainly not going to go out of their way to be nice to you. (Their logo is the frickin' Death Star, after all!)
I really hope the "new Motorola" will use only stock Android from now on. It doesn't even make sense to me to do it otherwise.
I'd love it if that were true, sounds like an excellent rebuttal to the usual 'android gets spam' retort.
As I understand it most of the time the problem is the user themselves, the app requested some permission and the user granted it.
None of the companies have any clue whatsoever when it comes to UI design, software development, etc. The majority of the process is usually centered around putting some kind of brand-specific skinning on the OS as a "differentiator". It only gets worse when the carriers request their own specific branding on a handset. Usually the designs are put together by one or two designers and the emphasis is often on visual impact as opposed to usability. Flash tends to win over function, and often times things are redesigned for no good reason between product releases.
It's no surprise then that Apple is eating their lunch, at least they have a coordinated effort.
Oh God, yup. The last place I interned for was using CVS, and the devs wanted to switch to Git. This desire percolated up a few levels, and a couple months later it's announced that we're switching to ClearCase. Two months before a major version of our product drops. Cue 3 weeks of mayhem as ClearCase manages to mangle everything, then the same people who made the ClearCase decision are furious that we are so far behind target and begin to "question the competency" of the devs at out site.
Yeah, thanks but I'm staying the hell away from HW companies in the future.
But hey, ClearCase is from IBM, so it has to be good, right? It was made by a team of experts, not some pudgy Finn. Clearly the codemonkeys just don't understand business, which is why we're building our web app in Java over their objections. Java is what Enterprise uses, and this is Enterprise software. Makes perfect sense.
And then some manager will find out and fire someone for wasting valuable company time and resources hacking on some irrelevant side project or hacking the companies security system or something.
Some places are just broken politically and no amount of technical cleverness can fix it. At places like that your only option is to learn to live with it, learn to play the political game or quit.
So theoretically it could work, but you would waste some time
Not to mention people related to CC are usually rude, ignorant, afraid to be made redundant so they rely on blackmail and threats to keep their position (yes, I'm generalizing)
they actually told a roomful of hackers to ask permission.
fuck that?
Apple are very good at making premium products, they have a greater than 94% market share for computers over $1,000USD. They all but own the tablet space despite their significantly higher retail price. The only competitors that succeed against Apple are the ones willing to have razor thin margins producing commodity products - this is where Android comes in, the bulk of Android devices are budget conscious. Google tried the premium Android approach originally and it failed enough for them to abort the approach completely.
How many years did it take non-Apple laptop manufacturers to figure it out after Apple proved you could make a nice laptop that people would buy?
Who are you replying to? The comment you replied to makes the arguable point that vendor add-ons are a problem. That is a debatable point as each iteration of Android has essentially usurped functionality pioneered in those skins.
but you need to understand why it's so popular - it lets just about every phone maker produce incredibly cheap handsets
Gah! Where are all of these "incredibly cheap" handsets? ZTE? Huwei? The overwhelming bulk of Android handsets (edit: I realize this is worded poorly, but I mean relative to sales -- the top selling handsets are predominately the top tier devices) are priced similarly to the iPhone. And why are you making uninformed comments about Android on a board where the overwhelming majority of participants are very informed on the market?
And ignoring the fact that Samsung, HTC, and Motorola probably spend more on software developer, per handset, than a Windows Phone license, even if they went for Windows Phone licenses is that $5-$15 license fee going to really be the difference between "incredibly cheap" and not incredibly cheap?
This Android == the low end nonsense is garbage. It is hubris of the worst kind.
Terrible. Just terrible. I'm going full jerk now, threatening my glorious Avg:5 score, but save comments like that for Engadget stories.
Not even close to true. Having a look at my favorite purveyor of phones (www.katshing.se) I see that, by far, the most expensive phone they sell is the 64GB 4s and the only phones that are close to the price of a 16GB 4s is HTC One X, the Galaxy Note and the preorder for the Galaxy SIII.
In the half-the-price-of-the-4s category you have some pretty decent phones like the HTC OneV, Experia Arc S and Samsung Galaxy S plus. Halving the price again (~$250) and you can get a Samsung Galaxy Ace, HTC Explorer or Wildfire S or Motorola Defy Mini.
The simple truth is that probably half the people I know with android phones have android phones because they where a lot cheaper than the iPhone. The fact that you can buy a great smart phone from a brand name like Samsung for $200 unlocked and off contract is incredibly enticing to a large number of people, and Android helped make that happen.
I didn't put a specific disclaimer for Sweden, I suppose.
the most expensive phone they sell is the 64GB 4s
Incredibly few people buy the 64GB variant. Since we're so fond of anecdotes, I know zero people who bought the 64GB iPhone 4S. I see no reason, at all, why that data point has any relevance.
The top selling Android phones, worldwide, are the Galaxy Notes, SII's, Razrs, and other premium devices. Low cost devices -- despite your anecdotes -- haven't even made a dent in the top 10 yet. It is a completely irrelevant aspect, thus far.
That will change, of course, but when someone buys a Razr or an SII or a Note or a One X, they aren't choosing a discount option.
But there are a million low-end models with little to differentiate them, so it's not surprising at all that none of them are in the top 10. That by itself doesn't mean that the "Non-Top 10" category isn't 99% of the market. (It's not, of course; I'm just saying that looking at the top 10 doesn't give you any more info on the total makeup of the market than the comment you're so vociferously responding to.)
Looks like you did not put US specific disclaimer. A lot (most?) of people from outside the US pay full price for their phones. And price is important to them.
Also, I would like to see your source for the wordwide top selling Adnroid phones.
While the top 10 most popular devices are all high end, just look at how much of the market the low-end, low-volume devices make up. It's at least a fourth of all devices, and I imagine if you count former top-end devices which sell for cheaper now, half the market was sold below the high-end. Even among the popular devices there at lots of cheaper ones in there, Samsung along have a raft of lower cost devices that are quite popular on there (Ace, Marvel, Galaxy Y)
A review of the IDC data shows that 'other' brands make up 27%, that's a share larger than Apple's, and testament to just how many fringe product brands there are out there, let alone the listless number of smartphone models that exist under each of those fringe brands.
Additionally, as you've noted top 10 is restricted to a certain time period, again not a good indicator for total sales of a handset.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/samsung-apple-continu...
The revenue figures for each company paint a clear picture of what their average phone sale is, and a better clue to where the bulk of the phones are predominantly sold.
Where is that picture clearly painted? You conveniently jumped a massive chasm in your other post, inventing numbers, and came up with "75% the price of an iPhone". Again, "incredibly cheap"? This is a ridiculous conversation.
Samsung have a 29.1% marketshare of smart phones by volume. (IDC) Apple has a 24.2% marketshare of smart phone by volume. (IDC) The others don't crack 10% each.
Samsung won't reveal revenue for Android, for reasons that will become obvious shortly, but they do reveal their entire mobile division has 17B revenue. This division shipped 144.4M mobile phones, 42M of those were smart phones, a figure slightly lower than that belong to Android. We can be lenient and pretend that the bulk of the 17B revenue were from pricier Android devices, even though this would be fallacious.
Apple's iPhone business (not iPod/iPad) has revenue of 23B, already exceeding Samsung's entire mobile business.
Samsung lead Android sales commanding ~40% of the Android market share.
Meaning that the largest seller of Android smartphones, who sells more smartphones than any other producer including Apple is making 75% the amount of revenue of Apple, on not just their Android business, but their total mobile division where Android makes up a fraction of it. This can only mean one thing. The average selling price of those Android devices is well below 75% of the average iPhone sale. (Rather likely far lower when you consider that the 17B figure comprises of all of Samsung's sales.)
These are the facts, they speak for themselves. The data is the latest from May IDC, and the revenue results are the publicly announced data from the last quarter from both Samsung & Apple.
The only thing you're burying is your head in the sand.
How very conspiratorial. So what, exactly, are they hiding? They want the price per unit to seem high? Or maybe they simply don't feel those are relevant numbers or numbers they want competitors knowing.
This can only mean one thing. The average selling price of those Android devices is well below 75% of the average iPhone sale.
I went along with your logic open minded, but you do realize there is a giant unknown in your claims, right? I suppose this links back to the conspiratorial claims about revenue numbers, however you have no idea what Samsung's average unit price is for Android phones. None whatsoever.
But let's pretend that the average Samsung smartphone sells for 75% the price of an iPhone. Does that qualify as "incredibly cheap"? That is a laughable notion.
Wait, what? Do you have a source for that? I'm pretty sure these numbers are not correct.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/07/apple-nabs-91-of-premiu...
If you click through to the story this is based on, you find this: http://betanews.com/2009/07/22/apple-has-91-of-market-for-1-...
Two caveats:
1. They're talking about revenue-share, not a share of units. That 91% revenue-share is very likely to translate into a somewhat smaller share of units because Apple's Mac ASP is probably substantially higher than the overall Windows ASP, even when you're restricting both to the $1000+ segment.
2. They're talking about PCs sold "at US retail". I'm not sure what their definition of that is (I couldn't easily find the original report), but there are two things it almost certainly does not include: sales to businesses and direct sales from manufacturer websites.
I find that unsurprising. I think it would be hard for NPD to gather that sort of data. However, both segments are important in $1000+ Windows PC market. Business buy plenty of $1000+ PCs (I'm sitting in a room of them). And the best price for a $1000+ consumer PC is almost always at the manufacturer website. I strongly suspect that, for most manufacturers (except Apple), the majority of $1000+ PCs are sold directly from their website.
I recently got the HTC One X and have been very happy with its usability and performance, but then I don't have access to a stock Android ICS phone so I can't make the comparison.
Manual set up of Exchange accounts was flat out broken on my Droid 4 the first 3-4 months it was on the market, despite being something that works perfectly fine in vanilla Android. The breakage happened because Motorola decided to implement their own "corporate account" feature rather than just use the one that was baked in.