Thursday 8 September 2011

The World of Android

Catching up with some evening reading online, and two somewhat older articles posted on ZDNet at the end of August caught my attention. Article 1 & Article 2

Give article 1 a read first. This mobile patent war is getting more stupid by the day, the amount of companies suing other companies all over mobile patents. Now with Steve Jobs stepping down as company CEO, will Apple ever be the same? in terms of how strong the name Apple is, without Steve, can they maintain that name?

To me, Apple are such an ego based company, suing Android makers for patent infringement, HTC, Motorola & Samsung, but now these companies are all counter suing Apple.

I'm sure you all saw the news recently of an Apple employee losing the iPhone 4 prototype in a bar, but lets look at it this way. There is a chance they did this on purpose - look at the attention they got from it, and as a prototype, it could of been nothing more than a "leak" to see what people thought of it before actually releasing it fully around the world.

Recent news also showing Apple hiring for a new job as Product Security Manager, someone to look after Apples new hardware product without risk of losing them, but from here (to me), Apple are going down hill.

Now on article 2, carrying on with the theme of Apple and Android. Reasons why I chose Android over other phones/OS's. Reading article 2, I agree mostly with the David Gewirtz, I hate Apple products, the iPhone layout was just so hard to grasp.

David, your second reason on the insecurity of Android. I can see your reasoning, but that is just one risk that comes with open source software - people reverse engineer it and look for holes to abuse and push malware through, and the malicious apps that subscribe the phone to premium rate numbers and reading text messages and listen to voice mails, but with Android slowly taking over the market share, again, it's just one side effect, the malware authors follow the largest crowd. There is good reason to go with the closed source more secure iPhone over Android, but my open source freedom is not something I want to give up. The malware problem nowadays, 99% of it is the end user - installing things that are too good to be true or don't read what apps they install are accessing - a lot of the problem would be avoided if they did.

Next, yeah Google's way of naming the Android version is a bit weird, how they jumped from 2.2 to 3.0 can be a little confusing when your looking for one version specifically, but that's one that I suppose I like about Google, the unexpectedness of it, keep people guessing!

I suppose it is a downside of Google releasing newer Android OS's that can't run on whatever phone you purchase, but again, I'll run the risk. Making tweaks to the phone is just like any software I install, going through the options to finetune it to how I want to run it.

Other that what I've posted above, I agree completely with everything else.

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