When Eric Schmidt from Google talks about future market trends (with convenient bite-sized quotes) people sit up and listen. When he recently announced that there would be 'an explosion of Android adoption', a lot of people got very excited and his may indeed soon become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
One of the catalysts for this explosion could very well come from the sleek and feature-packed Droid, just out this week in the US. It boasts a big screen with great resolution (about double that of the iPhone 3G), pull out QWERTY keyboard and a 5MP camera with flash and zoom.
All the right bits of hardware seem to be in place but what about the software? Android 2.0 (codename 'Eclair') is definitely a step up from its predecessor and more and more apps are coming on stream in the Android Market. Sure, we are still far from the mecca of the Apple App Store, but things are moving on nicely.
As Apple and Google begin to diverge in their strategic objectives for mobile (Apple limiting releases of some Google products like Google Talk and Google pre-releasing new products on Android, such as the new Google Maps Navigation software, part of the hegemenony of Apple will clearly be challenged.
Sooner or later, I expect Apple to drop Google Maps altogether and replace it with its in-house mapping product Placebase. Boy, will that be a landmark for the iPhone! And it will also mean that consumers will more and more make their handset purchase decision based on whether their preferred software is featured or not.
One of the catalysts for this explosion could very well come from the sleek and feature-packed Droid, just out this week in the US. It boasts a big screen with great resolution (about double that of the iPhone 3G), pull out QWERTY keyboard and a 5MP camera with flash and zoom.
All the right bits of hardware seem to be in place but what about the software? Android 2.0 (codename 'Eclair') is definitely a step up from its predecessor and more and more apps are coming on stream in the Android Market. Sure, we are still far from the mecca of the Apple App Store, but things are moving on nicely.
As Apple and Google begin to diverge in their strategic objectives for mobile (Apple limiting releases of some Google products like Google Talk and Google pre-releasing new products on Android, such as the new Google Maps Navigation software, part of the hegemenony of Apple will clearly be challenged.
Sooner or later, I expect Apple to drop Google Maps altogether and replace it with its in-house mapping product Placebase. Boy, will that be a landmark for the iPhone! And it will also mean that consumers will more and more make their handset purchase decision based on whether their preferred software is featured or not.
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