The smartphone battle seems to have begun very recently and with a whole lot of tablets and mobile devices coming up recently, platforms are getting themselves ready to face the challenge and take on. Some have already called Android the winner, the Operating System which is barely a couple of years old. While emerging platforms like Windows Phone 7 and WebOS are coming up, the potential of these platforms are highly doubtful at this stage. However, Android seems to be doing really well if you look at the numbers.
The way the Operating System has been evolving is breathtaking. Gradually, from a small build on the T-mobile G1 to a whole ecosystem running on a plethora of devices with a ton developers working on them currently. Open Sourcing the Operating System was the root cause of this victory and the future of the OS is still not clear. Google is competing close with iOS on the mobile phone scenario, going above the iPhone on the sales charts of various regions around the world. However, Google’s Android based tablets have been sold in very very few numbers around the world.
Google never showed us how or what Ice Cream Sandwich would be and how it would integrate the Operating System on Tablets and Cellphones. The current fragmentation system has become silly and this isn’t their path for the future, that’s for sure. How did Apple do the tablet? They knew building a whole new ecosystem for tablets would not get them apps at the moment. But at the same time, resizing iPhone apps on the 10 incher wouldn’t look nifty too. The strategy they evolved to get developers make exclusive apps for the iPad and otherwise go for iPhone apps on the 2X mode seems to be working like a charm. Now, there are over 90,000 iPad exclusive apps on the App Store and it’s not been long since the first iPad launched.However, Google released a whole new operating system for their Tablets named Honeycomb recently and they’re already showcasing Ice Cream Sandwich, calling it the future of Android.
Manufacturers are disappointed and so are the Android fanboys who love it on their cellphones. Motorola spent a ton on the Xoom‘s R&D and marketing it but the sales charts have disappointed. Manufacturers like Acer and Lenovo entered the tablet segment with high hopes on Android but everything seems to be pointless at this stage.
I’m not sure if Google knows what it’s doing. Having just around 200 tablet apps on Honeycomb and trying to compete with a hundred thousand apps on iOS, shouldn’t they be taking every step to promote developers and widen their App Market? Instead, they just seem to make the whole scneario more hazy and confusing the developers. How are they going to create a universal ecosystem for Android(on tablets). Even if they would manage to, isn’t it already too late to compete with iOS? Or should they just quit the tablets?
You just don’t have the time, Google. You already seem to have lost it. Or let’s see if you could prove me wrong.