What’s Going On With Android?

The hardware isn’t keeping up with the software.

Look, cell phone manufacturers aren’t known for quality design. That’s why the iPhone won. Part of this, of course, is due to the cell phone market being bigger in the Eastern hemisphere, where design doesn’t matter as much as a high features-to-price ratio. (In contrast, the iPhone launched in the West and went East.)

So give them a slick software platform, and most of these firms will be clueless. Sure, they got the pieces into play – touch screens for one. But so shabbily designed that they’re borderline unusable. (LG phones in particular don’t seem to understand the point of a touch screen.)

Google made the play that if the software’s right, the hardware will come. That’s clearly not the case. (Again, partly due to the East vs. West dynamic.) So they have to keep flagshipping (picking winners by rewarding better design as in the case with the Droid) the hardware (now even building their own phone). If they don’t, the ecosystem is going to die off (albeit slowly) as interest plummets in the software as a result of bad hardware.

-Shlok
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