Android and the Future of Cell Phones

If you watch TV you’ve no doubt seen the iDon’t commercials.  Now these are by far not the first commercials to openly dis on Apple. We can all remember Microsoft’s laptop hunter commercials and then there was the more subtle ‘there’s a map for that’ commercials.  This type of advertising has been around for a long time and will not be going anywhere soon.

Currently the Cell phone market is dominated by one phone, the Apple iPhone.  Anyone who has an iPhone can tell you what is wrong with it and what it doesn’t hold it’s weight on.  This is no different than any other tech gadget, as soon as the initial awe factor wears off you start to see what areas your new, fancy and possibly expensive toy falls behind in.  These areas just increase and grow wider the older something is. The iPhone was released over two years ago, in tech years that’s a lot, so of course there will be things that new phones can do that it can’t.

This is where Android comes into play.  If anyone is not familiar with Android yet it is the new open source, cell phone targeted, operating system designed by Google.  It was designed and developed to be as flexible as possible and being open source it also makes it cheaper to produce phones based on.  This is something that is going to be extremely popular with cell phone manufacturers as it allows them to put that extra development money into hardware to produce faster and more capable phones.

The important thing to note here about Android is it’s flexibility and that is something the iDon’t commercials are focusing on.  The more popular Android becomes the more developers that will be involved in producing updates for it as well as quality apps.  Because of this I believe that Android phones will last longer than your average phone and that the main reason for upgrades will be hardware advancements rather than a better set of software.  Now I have no doubt that at some point in time carriers will stop servicing certain phones with updates, but that won’t stop hardcore users from updating their phones manually.

Android phones are preparing to storm the fortress of the currently iPhone dominated cell phone market.  While a single Android phone will likely never be as popular as the iPhone was I do see phones based on the Android operating system taking a large majority of the market within two years.  It is no coincidence that a large number of Android phones are coming out around the same time that most iPhone owners will be coming out of their 2 year contracts.  They are aiming to take on those users who have had an iPhone and are ready for the next big thing, and that thing is Android.