All talks today about companies seemed to evolve around two topics:
– how lousy are some sectors in the US business (driven down by the automakers double digit decrease in sales and the retail dipping, except for the ubiquoiutous retail sales), and
– how the communications/internet sectors are getting into even more serious troubles.
First of all, Nokia has come on the news with its almost 10% market share in some major markets, especially in the US. And then, the long awaited mobile phone from Google (promissed once with the launch of the IPhone from Apple), will enter the T Mobile shops in the US at the beginning of October.
Of course, the comparison of the Android (yes, that’s the code name of the Google’s new gadget) with the IPhone is inevitable. Because, after all, the mobile phones can be divided for the moment in 3 categories – the IPhone, the Blackberries and the others, including the hundreds of Samsung and Nokia copycats. And revising even those categories would take doitinvest.com several years, so let’s focus on the android.
As any copycat, Google should have been learning some lessons from its predecessors. And it did. The software to be put on the phone is already much more sophisticated than the one already existing on the IPhones or the blackberries (launched 2 years ago or more). As you can see on the official Android website, there are already more than 50 open source software applications already developed for the Android. And they should be relatively stable, provided the company’s programming experience.
However, for multiple reasons Google’s Android mobile phone has failed to raise the excitement that other mobile phones launches did. For one reason, Google did not push at all through the market its mobile phone – it has actually tried the same strategy as Apple, trying to let the consumers get what’s new and exciting. Of course, it is a follower, so probably it failed to do so, since consumers nowadays need proof not marketing, so we’ll see how much of the hype is true when the phone will probably be launched.
Secondly, the Android looks outside and inside like many other phones. Of course it has an operating system (independantly developed), a browser and multiple connectivity options. And so do all the other mobile phones in its category, including all the ones running on Windows Mobile 6.1. Probably Android has some novel features inside, such as improved navigation capabilities or even the Chrome browser, but I guess that even the biggest fans get tired of testing the 4th set of browsers and mobile phone applications each year. So, until it is launched, there is no big excitement about it. We at doitinvest.com hope that the rumours are true though, and that Android will be a hell of a mobile phone. We’ll wait and see, while the Google’s shares are dropping below $500 (when they were quoted at more than $700 at the beginning of the year…
Article originally published by www.doitinvest.com