Monday, February 20, 2012

No Android 4.0 upgrade for "Android iPhone Killer" bad news for Android

Samsung Galaxy S was my first Android phone I could not resist to buy after positioning it as an "Android iPhone killer" . As an iPhone fan I wanted to have an unbiased view of the Android phone capabilities versus the iPhone experience I got used to so much. In this way it became my second smartphone, not counting my office blackberry which is for me a necessary evil to do my work. I described my experience with the Samsung Galaxy S in a number of recent posts.
Not working applications as Skype, compatibility problems and a very painful experience with Samsung Kies software,used to upgrade Samsung Galaxy firmware , demonstrated everything BUT an iPhone experience ! That was a reason I decided to give Android another chance and decided to buy a Nexus S which in many ways addressed shortcomings of the Samsung Galaxy S.
The recent Samsung announcement which says that the Samsung Galaxy S will not get an Android 4.0 upgrade is not only bad news for more than 10 million Galaxy S users but it also demonstrates a much bigger problem I wrote about and was hoping Google would address:
huge fragmentation of the Android market encouraging the smartphone manufactures to do their own software customizations which are costly to maintain and demand so much from the smartphones CPU that software upgrade cannot be done without a risk of impacting customer experience. The second one is the official Samsung explanation for not supporting the upgrade. In this way Android 4.0, with so many new features as, long awaited, data usage monitoring program preventing users to exceed their data plans and be confronted by high data roaming costs will not be available to millions of users just 16 months after the phone introduction !
In my view the only assurance to have the newest Android version on your smartphone is buying the Google phone, like Nexus S. All other smartphonesmanufactures will stay far behind in offering the latest Android version on their phones due to a significant effort required to make new versions work on their hardware. Unfortunately Google missed the opportunity to become for Android , what Microsoft is for Windows. Lack of Android standardization will make smartphone innovation very costly, pushing Android smartphone manufactures to a low margin commodity market. Motorola acquisition will for sure not help but make position of current Android smartphone manufactures even worse. No wonder that more and more smartphone manufactures are looking for cooperation with Microsoft to offer Windows phones. I think that the recent success of Nokia Lumia 800/900  and public statements, as  from HTC CEO Peter Chou, about the newest HTC windows phone Titan II "This is my personal device,” will help to accelerate a move towards Windows OS. I am sure that due to a very mature Windows release process and the software standardization the smartphone manufactures can focus on what they do best : hardware innovation The users of Windows smartphones will enjoy Windows experience and features coming with new Windows versions for years.
I strongly believe that this year will be a spectacular year for Windows smartphone manufactures and Windows mobile platform will for sure find its way also in enterprises.
Soon we can expect news that "Windows iPhone killer" is coming as the iPhone is for sure not going to be killed by Android as there is no such a thing as an "Android experience" and it is the user experience that counts.