Arekibo Blog

So Apple have made the iPad available for pre-sale. I mentioned before that I wasn’t going to be buying an iPad (although at the time, I didn’t know that was what it was going to be called). I told a little lie.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad in his (rather underwhelming) January keynote, I watched with my wife and we agreed that while it was a nice to have and nice to hold item, it really served no other purpose than to give someone who needed only Internet and email, access to those facilities without having to spring for a netbook or laptop.  I can see the attraction, the beautiful form factor, the great design, but isn’t it really just a big iPhone? It’s certainly more self contained than a netbook. On the other hand, the more we agreed that was what it was for, the more we agreed it would suit my wife’s requirement for Internet and email access. So a week after the announcement, we put her name on the waiting list in an Apple reseller here in Dublin (we don’t have Apple Stores, only resellers); hence the little lie.

In February, Barcelona hosted the World Mobile Congress and while watching the news feeds and blog posts coming from there on Engadget, Boy Genius Report and Wired, it became obvious that the next big player in the mobile world is Android, Google’s own mobile operating system which is a direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone OS. A brief conversation with a mate working in the telecoms industry confirmed what I suspected and within a week, I had two HTC Heros purchased.

So the big question here is why? Why did I take this very sudden step in the other direction? And what of the pre-ordered iPad? The very simple answer is lock-in.

Apple are the only producers of the iPhone and iPad and are the only producers of the iPhone/iPad OS that runs on it. It will only ever be Apple. We will never see a Samsung phone running the iPhone OS. Sure, the App Store is huge, but Android’s only getting started. While Apple talk about the billionth app downloaded, they hide the fact that there’s only 150,000 applications available in total (and this has recently been reduced due to the clean up on the App Store of “morally offensive” material). Likewise, there are only 6,500 Android applications, but expect this to grow and grow exponentially based on the fact that Android is the exact opposite of iPhone OS; it’s not tied to one particular brand, phone or platform. Ninty percent of phones released at the MWC were Android driven. There are a number of other perks too from a developer’s perspective. Apple charge $99 per year for developers to produce apps. They also take apps through a (sometimes overly) rigorous acceptance process before allowing it to be available on the App Store. Google charge a $25 one off fee as a developer and allow any app to be submitted to the Android Market. The percentages both companies take are the same, but at the end of the day, while I still love Apple, Android makes life easier.

I’ve lost a lot of “Google Love” of late with their imposition of Buzz on me, and Android is no-where near perfect. But I have the Android SDK on my MacBook, an Eclipse plugin and I’ve already started happily building mini-apps on my new HTC Hero. It’s a learning curve, but I’m enjoying it. Best of all, it hasn’t cost me a penny.

And my wife has access to the Internet and email… all her own new Hero. Everyone’s a winner.