Hello all! I didn't make an appearance yesterday, but I'm one of the other guest-bloggers, and for the time I'm here, I'll be focusing mostly on tech stuff.
A friend and I have an ongoing argument over which is the better platform, Google Android or iPhone OS. I will hold out for iPhone OS, but if the market is any indication, Americans are far more partial to Android:
Smartphones carrying Google’s Android operating system outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, according to new research out today from NPD.
During the quarter, Android handsets accounted for 28% of smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21% share. BlackBerry was the bestselling OS, with its devices capturing 36% of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris.
Now, there are a two important caveats to this, the biggest being that whereas iPhone OS is restricted to a single piece of hardware, Android is present on more than thirty devices in the United States. If you are purchasing a smartphone, and it isn't an iPhone or a Blackberry, chances are that it is an Android device. Which makes the comparison a little unfair; I'm sure iPhone OS's share of the market would be much greater if it weren't proprietary software.
I said there were two caveats to this, and here is the second one: while Android is a leader in the United States (second only to Blackberry OS), worldwide, Apple still holds the crown with 46 percent market share, compared to 25 percent for Android. I expect those numbers to reach parity within two years, as Android matures as a platform and more phones carry the platform. In any case, insofar that there is anything interesting about this, it's that Google has emerged as a real mobile competitor with Apple. With any luck, this competition will push Apple in the right direction, in terms of features and responsiveness (and of course, this is to say nothing of Microsoft's reemergence in the mobile world).