What do you think about the google Android?

Alex_Sanders

Free means more user, but I doubt it's gonna be more profitable, as you may have already seen, no matter how much money Apple put in reinforcing the jail, people manage to break it.

And we all know what card Apple is holding, rich people that see 10 bucks as 1 buck, 1 buck as virtually free. So most of Apple's users really don't bother spending hours hogging on some free wares site to crack his phone wide open. Heck, they might make much more if they put the time on something else. So higher tides allows bigger landing craft to unload more troops, in this case, more cha-chin.

But what's Android's tactic? Would it also generate enough market revenue to attract more developers? Thus generate even more market revenue and form a positive echo?

All in all, I highly doubt how Android is going to make itself a very profitable platform. What do you guys think?

NeoDevin

This post suggests that Android is already winning.

TylerH

There's no reason apps for Android must be free. There's a whole category dedicated to "paid" apps: http://www.android.com/market/

JaredJames

Not necessarily. If it isn't up to scratch people will soon stop using it.
Purely speculative at best. This only works on the basis only the rich have iphones and I can assure you that isn't the case (at least in the UK).
Perhaps in the same way Canonical does with Ubuntu? I'm not entirely sure.

Given that Google has a revenue of around $26 billion (I believe those were the figures six months ago at least), I'd say they're doing pretty well in the open source / freeware market.

I actually like Google's approach to things.

By not having an excessive process for getting your apps published, it allows more people to have a chance at getting their work out there.

NobodySpecial

Android is going to be a very profitable platform for the various Chinese and Korean smartphone makers that don't have to develop their own operating system and attract developers and for Google who will have a phone that connects to their site for searching and more importantly ad viewing.

Google's concern is that smartphone OS makers, like Apple, Nokia, Blackberry and MSFT might do deals so that the search box on say a win mobile7 phone only works with Bing, or data plans on a Nokia only connect to Facebook or Myspace.
Google needs a smartphone to be a way of people paying to view it's ads - giving away a free OS is a very good way of making this happen.

TylerH

The internet without Google isn't the internet. Not only that, but if I get a phone with internet capabilities, I want the internet; not some watered down, censored crap. I, for one, would never buy anything from a company that thinks it can restrict me from getting the full use of what I pay for.

NobodySpecial

If you aren't either a corporate customer or a teenage girl the cell phone companies really don't give a **** for what you want.
A lot of the low price data packages on smart phones are 'social networking' only = facebook, myspace etc

Running an open source OS right now?

JaredJames

The original restrictions were to do with the network capacities and the phones at the time. New smartphones use a different technology (HSDPA) to give a high speed, quality service.
You pay for what you get, not for "full use". It's only wrong if they specify unrestricted and sell you restricted.