Will Iphones be replaced by Google Phones?

Google Android Smart-phones may make inroads into the  market, but they will never totally dominate it. Apple is a moving target. Apple has a strong Vision about their products, but they've learned that they need to respond to their competition, as well as to what the marketplace wants.

When Google-phones had multitasking and Apple didn’t, Apple eventually came around and included a decent multitasking response. When Droid did tethering and IPhone didn’t, eventually Apple added a sort-of blue-tooth tethering to the iPhone. Apple has learned from it’s past that a strong vision is good, but tweaking that vision toward what the market wants is better. Apple has done a good job of not staying locked too-far into it’s vision.

Some of the biggest complaints with the IPhone 3G was no video recording, slow processing,not enough memory, no copy-and-pasting, and no multitasking. Those problems are all fixed now with the newest IPhone 4g and the rest of their line-up of iDevices. And even 1st generation of IPhones were able to take advantage of many of the features included in iOS upgrades.

Google android phones may be open source. But they also have some of the failings of other open-source projects like Linux. There’s a ton of different versions out there. There may not be versions like Redhat, Ubuntu etc, but there are Android version 2.2, 1.6, 1.8 etc. A user can’t just update their phone to the latest and greatest Android version, because each phone manufacturer is using the openess of the system to include their own customizations. These customizations sometimes break with an OS update. It’s the responsibility of the Phone manufacturers and carriers to make sure their customizations work. Instead of back programming old phones with new customizations, carriers put their resources into new hardware comes out with the new version of the OS. An Android user basically has to buy a new phone if they want to take advantage of new features.

Buyers feel a little safer knowing that, for the most part, Phones, IPads, and IPod Touches, hold their value better then Google phones. Since Apple is the source of all their hardware, they make  sure that most of the new features of updates work across all their devices.

Without having an enforced unified Operating-System level, some programmers can’t be sure if the proper libraries and API’s will be there to support the Apps that they write. The programmer may include instructions that take advantage of the newest OS, but lo and behold, half the users can’t even update their phones. On the other hand, a programmer may find that his app is broken with a new Operating system update.

The iPhone iOS is bolstered by the fact that every IPod touch and IPad is basically another iPhone (but with less continuous access to the internet). The IPod touch is definitely a gateway product for people getting the IPhone. People buy a IPod Touch while keeping their old phone until they can afford to go to AT&T. Eventually they get sick of carrying around two devices and make getting the IPhone happen.

Google’s advantage is that their phones are cheaper then IPhones. They also have more options in the U.S. markets as far as carriers go. Apple could easily drop the price on their phones and sales would go through the roof. Apple has already just added Verizon as a U.S. Carrier and people are flocking to it.

Without competition between these two rivals, the prices on Smart-phones would still probably be sky-high. If there was no IPhone, we’d still be on our Palm-pilots, PDAs, Treos, and Blackberry’s. If Google-Android didn’t come out, surely we’d still have IPhones that don’t multitask or copy-and-paste. Competition is a good thing.