October 09, 2009, 5:13 AM — Say, did you hear that, in Android, the smartphone world at last has an OS worthy to challenge the iPhone? It's true! Sure, it's been around for a while, but suddenly it's starting to gain momentum, with a rash of new Android handsets coming out soon. Verizon and Google have a deal to get some Android phones to Verizon customers will hopefully kill the (always untenable) rumors of iPhones on Verizon for good; but conversely, Android is heading for Apple territory, with Dell of all companies supposedly making an Android phone for AT&T.
Now, I have no strong opinions on the technical merits of Android, having not used an Android phone myself. I hear they're quite nice, actually! But I can't help but think back to the hype that bubbled up when Palm's Pre was about to hit the market: it was going to take the iPhone on head to head, transform the smartphone market, etc. While lots of people seem to think that the Pre is a good phone and WebOS a platform with potential, the world's reaction to the Pre turned out to be pretty underwhelming, and its sales have not hit taken a significant chunk out of the iPhone juggernaut. In retrospect, I think everyone, the media included, loves a good fight, loves to see the underdog take the big guy down a notch, and loves to pick up on the next big thing, and I wonder if that attitude colored some of the Pre coverage. If so, a lot of the same thing could be going on with the latest rash of Android coverage.
Of course, Android isn't quite the same thing as either the iPhone or the Pre, which are both a fairly tightly coupled OS-phone pair from a single company. It's not Google that's competing with the iPhone, exactly; it's really the host of companies that will be churning out Android phones of varying feature sets and, perhaps, quality. And, importantly, since Google never advertises itself, ever (a Gartner analyst in one of the pieces linked above gripes about this), that leaves open the question of who's going to do the all-important promotion work to boost Android. The answer, in the absence of Google, is nobody. Dell, or Samsung, or whoever, doesn't want you to buy an "Android phone"; they want you to buy their Android phone. This makes it less a battle between two giants and more a shifting series of skirmishes and alliances among companies that aren't selling exactly the same kind of thing. It will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out, but I fear it once again won't make a neat narrative for the press.
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