I’ve come to like the Android after my early heavy frustrations (there’s a post coming up on what’s fundamentally right (read: compared to iOS)), but I can’t shut up on some very fundamental, conceptual issues that will (for now) make some people less happy than they should be with their Androids:

Customers have to specifically decide on a feature set, not just on the platform

It’s not enough to get “an Android phone”. There are two major differentiators on the Android platform that requires customers to look close to really get what they want: 1) the OS version and 2) the specific device capabilities. These two are interconnected (a device usually only comes with one specific OS version), but two devices with similar hardware can perform quite differently with different OSses.

The major differences customers can experience are along these lines (in no specific order):

• screen size
• networks supported (3G/WiFi,GSM)
• keyboard / touchscreen
  • multi-touch or just single-touch
    • (in the multi-touch case there are different qualities of multi-touch as well (number of simultaneous touches supported, robustness of detection)
• camera
  • sensor quality
  • flash (yes/no/type)
  • front-facing camera (yes/no)
• GPS (yes/no)
• pre-installed apps*
• fundamental look and feel of the apps on the device*
• availability of fundamental apps like navigation*
• availability of tethering
• size of internal memory
  • this is a big issue because pre-2.2 devices cannot install applications on SD cards and this limits the amount of installable apps dramatically
• Google certification*
• enterprise security features *

the items marked with a * will be subject to a future post because they require more detailed discussion

Many of these options that are not prominently advertised (and as such taken as a platform capability) make a difference for the applicability of your Android device (tethering? fundamental look and feel?). Also, all these options may lead to a Paradox of choice situation.

Now, to me it seems that the mobile devices market is mostly defined through devices, not so much through platforms, but that may be changing now. Apple delivers the iOS for different devices and Motorola calls it’s devices the Droids, so platform may be important.

The questions that remains to be answered: What are the defining properties of the Android platform from a customer perspective?

Der Beitrag wurde am Sunday, den 15. August 2010 um 10:45 Uhr veröffentlicht und wurde unter english, marketing, rechenmaschinen abgelegt. Du kannst die Kommentare zu diesen Eintrag durch den RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Du kannst einen Kommentar schreiben, oder einen Trackback auf deiner Seite einrichten.