.Dust

Just to be clear from the begin­ning: I am def­i­nitely a big fan of Android Devices.

Android

I have played a lot with the first G1 device, went through the HTC Magic and I am now play­ing with a Sam­sung Galaxy device.

Any­way I think that all of the ven­dors out there are miss­ing a huge opportunity.

We all under­stand, hope­fully, the mobile phones mar­ket dynam­ics. When the G1 hit the mar­ket I was think­ing that HTC was putting a mile­stone. We have been the very first com­pany to deliver a com­mer­cial Android device to the mar­ket. I am fine with that and I under­stand why it has to be done.

Was the G1 a good device? It was because it was the first device with Android. It wasn’t because of mate­ri­als that looked cheap com­pared to other HTC devices on the mar­ket at the same time (e.g. HTC Diad­mond, jut to name one).

Since then I have seen every sin­gle mobile phone man­u­fac­turer on the planet plan­ning Android devices to be launched, sooner or later.

Did they intro­duce some­thing new on those devices?

This is the sad part of the story: the answer is no.

They basi­cally took a vanilla ver­sion of Android and started build­ing their device around that. They have great sup­port from chipsets man­u­fac­tur­ers, they have the OS and that’s all they need to bring and Android device to the market.

The main point I want to make is: you have an open oper­at­ing sys­tem that you may cus­tomize as much as you want and you deliver the stan­dard imple­men­ta­tion to the market?

HTC hit the mile­stone to bring the fist Android device to the mar­ket and it should be time to bring some­thing different.

Android devices are not going to be cheap, at least in the next six month. They need quite a lot of pro­cess­ing power and this is going to cost money. If hand­set man­u­fac­turer will not focus on inno­vat­ing around Android we will see the usual fight for low prices with no innovation.

At this point in time I think we can say that Android is still a big missed opportunity.

On the bright side I think there are plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for third par­ties com­pany to deliver inno­v­a­tive Android User Inter­faces and applications.

Related posts:

1. New Google Android 0.9 Beta SDK. No Sup­port For Blue­tooth API and GTalkService.
2. Google Android Optional APIs
3. Google Android SDK Released
4. Con­trol your home from your mobile phone
5. Cam­era Phones vs. Cameras