1. Multiple phones on multiple carriers – Plain and simple, having more options for consumers makes it easier for Android to grab market share. Apple’s iPhone certainly made a splash but it is just one OS on one carrier. Imagine the market share the iPhone’s OS would have it was also available on Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Same goes for the Palm Pre. As great as the phone is, some people still aren’t willing to break their contracts with AT&T or Verizon simply to get the Pre. However, with Android-based phones being made on by multiple manufacturers and available on all the major networks, everyone will have an opportunity to buy one without switching.
2. Application availability - This has been Apple’s strength, and Palm’s weakness, in the smartphone market. People LOVE their apps. The phone isn’t just a phone anymore. It’s a mobile device, capable of surfing the net, locating a restaurant, tuning your guitar, keeping you entertained at the airport, translating a phrase to Spanish, giving you the recipe for a Surfer on Acid, ordering coffee, checking your bank account, and so forth. Comparing hardware and the base OS, the Palm Pre beats the iPhone in a number of categories and is rather close in others. However, it’s the iPhone’s bevy of app choices that gives it a hands-down clear victory over other smartphones compelling reasons to buy one over the other. There are already a whole slew of apps available for the Android and it’s app catalog will only grow larger.
3. App development - Many mobile app developers would rather develop on Android’s open source platform than deal with iPhone development rules, with the headaches that Blackberry development poses, and so forth. Having people WANT to develop apps on one platform over another certainly helps the cause.
4. Google backing - Google is loaded, no doubt about it. When they want something, they throw their genius at it and if that’s not enough then they dig into their enormous war chest to get the desired results.

Ultimately it’s up to the consumer to buy Android-based phones which will obviously determine the market share that it gains. Will it be big enough to overtake the iPhone? Not anytime soon. However, there are many compelling reasons for consumers to want an Android phone, from not leaving their current network to seeing what the next new thing is. Only time will tell, but given Google’s track record with new projects and the reasons given above, it’s simply just a matter of time.

Here’s what we have to look forward to in the next few upcoming posts. I started a comparison of two different virtualization apps, Sun’s open source VirtualBox and the non-open source VMWare Fusion. I started testing these two side-by-side on a MacBook Pro with both Windows XP and the Ubuntu distro of Linux. My initial notes and thoughts will be posted and I’ll let you know what I eventually ended up using and why.

I’ll also be setting up a new social networking site or two. I had started to set up one site using BuddyPress but eventually nixed that. Stay tuned and you’ll see why. Next up will be me evaluating other social networking frameworks such as Elgg, Dolphin 6 from Boonex, and possibly PHPibazi. If anyone has any thoughts on those solutions or others let me know and I’ll take a look into them.

I’ve also picked up a few side projects toying around with concrete5. I had tried it out maybe a year or so ago but didn’t stick with it. However, after trying it out again a couple months ago I must admit I like what I see. Dubbed as CMS by some and a “website builder” by others (that’s how it is labeled by some ISPs and they even have SimpleScripts installations on various ISPs). I will of course report on my findings, likes, dislikes, and the such.

What’s going on with Sprint?!? I know, I know, you’re all used to me reporting and commenting on Sprint Nextel’s latest news. I will once again be getting back to my analysis of the number 3 cellular carrier in the US.

Can the Palm Pre survive? Who knows. It’s a pretty damn good phone but…where the hell are the apps? If Apple has taught us anything with the iPhone, it’s that apps are key to the next successful smartphone. There are plenty of smartphones out there. How many can you name? Coincidence? I think not.

First off, Apple claims that Safari 4 is the fastest browser on the planet. Maybe, maybe not. To be honest, I really haven’t noticed any blazing speed. I’m not in it for the speed though. I crave stability and features that make my life easier (I remember when tabbed browsing first came out. I couldn’t imagine why any browser WOULDN’T have it. I’m curious to see what this new iteration of Safari does) while browsing the wonderous world of the interweb.

Things I dig:
Top Sites - This page is just plain awesome. Awesome. I love having a list of all of the top sites I hit (sure, I could use a the menu bar, but this gives me yet another way to access my top pages). The graphical representation is pretty darn cool too. As previous stated, I can now hit my top sites this way and perhaps keep reminder links up in the menu.

Cover Flow - What was once a nifty way of sorting through your albums in iTunes is now a great way sift through your history and bookmarks. Once again, it’s the graphical representation of the page that makes it for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bookmarked a bunch of pages on the same topic (ie, fantasy football stats) but then went through my list of bookmarks wondering “Is this the football page I’m looking for? Maybe this one? Crap…this one…” (I do have one gripe…that’ll go in the gripe section)

Developer Tools - This was a groovy feature (with some plug-ins) that I totally dug on Firefox. Being a pseudo-developer I can appreciate this feature (you’ve gotta turn it on in Safari’s Preferences) as I look at the sites I’m developing and yes…peeking at the code of other sites that I am admiring.

Things I don’t dig:
Tabs on Top - Apple touts this as a feature. I find it horrifically annoying. Let’s say I’ve got another app that I’m working in (Mail, TextEdit, etc) but have Safari open behind it. If I want to check on something in Safari I would click on the top of the browser and go to the page I intentionally left in front. Now I end up hitting a tab that I don’t want open or have to find some place on Safari’s page that does NOT have a link for fear of going to another page. Needless to say, it’s more of a hassle for me to switch back to the page I left open in Safari from another app than it was before. Maybe I’ll get used to it or find another way around this…maybe not.

Cover Flow issue - I dig the way Cover Flow puts up a picture of the page in your history but um, yeah, not so much for your bookmarks. Looks as if (at least in my experience) that you’ve got to click on each bookmark to index the picture so it’ll pop up in Cover Flow next time.

Facebook issue - Facebook is still agonizingly slow on Safari at times. Faster on Firefox for me. Granted it’s most definitely coding on Facebook’s site but the fact it runs faster on Firefox means it is possible to run faster on Safari. Right? Apple…it’s true, right?

Yahoo Finance issue – This has been annoying the crap out of me for a while. I track my stocks (why? to punish myself and see all that I lost? ugh) on Yahoo Finance and enjoy reading the news on various stocks. Generally I will command-click on the link to open a new tab for the article and voila, I’m good to go. Not so on Safari. It happened in 3 and it’s still happening in 4…the horrid oddity of me hitting the command key and Safari immediately sending me to the top of the page. It’s impossible for me to command-click on any tab in Yahoo…thus I gotta navigate away from Yahoo to read the story, go back, navigate away for another story, go back, lather, rinse, repeat. Bleehhhhhh…

Something I’ll probably dig:
Full History Search - I don’t feel like going through it all so I’ll just paste what Apple says about it on the Safari page. “Just type a word or phrase in the History Search field in Top Sites, and Safari quickly presents you with a list of possibilities. In fact, you can search for anything that was on a page you visited, even photo captions. To jog your memory, Safari presents the sites it finds in Cover Flow, giving you the opportunity to spot the right site on sight.” That looks pretty cool to me. Now to find some time to use it.

So those are my initial thoughts on Apple’s Safari 4 public beta for now. Even though my gripes list was longer than my kudos list, I’m most certainly giving Safari 4 a “two thumbs up” rating.

I shall continue to test and use and critique and report anything exciting, good or bad. I invite you all (it’s available for both PCs and Macs) to do the same and report back so that we can compile a list of pros and cons here for our readers and let them decide for themselves if they’d like to make the move to Safari 4 or not.

Chia Town readers know I have this odd obsession with Sprint and the Instinct. I love Sprint’s service, have been keeping a keen eye on their business practices, love what the Instinct has, and am quite curious to see how it will fare against the other smartphones out there. I’ve seen all the ads (print and TV mainly…and they’re all over the place) So why do I say the Instinct will be another has-been? The main reason is the developer community. I have heard nothing of the Instinct’s developer community yet have heard quite a bit about the iPhone’s community, the iPhone app store, and other such developer resources. The most telling item however was what I did this past weekend.

I was visiting with a friend from Carnegie Mellon this past weekend and in between watching the Tour de France and bowling on the Nintendo Wii (I play soccer at least once a week, yet I’m embarassed to say that I’m still sore from hours of Wii bowling) we discussed business ideas. One of the ideas we came up with was an app for the iPhone. My friend is a programmer. He’s never developed for a Mac and doesn’t really know what is involved. He doesn’t own an iPhone (nor do I). Yet here we were discussing various business ideas and the one that stuck was an app for a product neither of us own, that he’s never developed for, and working on a platform that we’ll have an eventual tie-in to. Multiply this by the thousands of other developers out there that have no iPhone or Mac experience then add a boatload more of Mac fanatics and you’ve got one hell of a pool of apps that are about to be available for the iPhone.

The Instinct is good…but it just can’t compare to the current and future following that the iPhone has.

Apple’s Safari came up lacking big time for me on a PC (Crappy old Dell running XP). It had some of the things I require in a browser (tabbed browsing being the main one) and is supposed to be kick ass under the hood with support for HTML v5, animated CSS, blazing speed, etc. I didn’t see the speed. Not only did I not see the speed, it moved like a herd of turtle stampeding through molasas on my machine. I finally got so frustrated with it today that I went back to Firefox 2 as my default browser.

There were other little quirks that annoyed me. One such quirk is how Safari didn’t seem to update what was on each tab. For example, I keep a number of tabs open at once…the intranet, GMail, another web-based email account, stocks on Yahoo, and one or two more things. In Firefox I know when I have a new message in GMail because the tab will update to “inbox (1)” (or however messages I’ve just received) and I know to check it. If I go to my GMail account, clear out the spam, go back to my inbox, the tab always reflects that. The story is much different in Safari. The tab sticks to whatever I was on two, five, eight clicks ago. It will say I’m in the spam folder when I’m not. It will say I’m on this one particular email when it’s been deleted an hour ago. It’s little things like this that kinda irk me as I try to be more efficient in my work day.

Let’s get back to that speed thing. I didn’t really notice a speed difference. What I DID notice was Safari taking up 99% of my computer resources and bringing my computer to a screeching halt. Not really a good thing when I’m trying to work. I was particularly irked this morning when I had opened a couple tabs to read different news articles and Safari again ate up my CPU. After seven to ten minutes I finally had to force quit Safari. I’d like to read those articles but now I have to do a search for them because I don’t have the source anymore. Again…who’s got time for that? I’ve got work to do.

It’s a shame…the press releases look soooo so good. The real world results for me were less than satisfying. Perhaps it’ll be more speedy and stable on my PowerBook at home…that still has yet to be seen. For work though…it’s me and Firefox 2 once again.

Fast forward to the present. Vista has been out for a while. I see it pre-loaded on most new machines now, yet I still have yet to see widespread adoption of it. Why? Because it still blows. The company I’m doing most of my contract work at right now still runs XP and for good reason. But I digress…here’s why I still loathe Vista.

I was over at a friend’s and we were going to watch some movies on her new laptop. Her old one had gone belly up so she had to replace it with a brand new machine. Yup…it came with Vista. And she’s STILL having problems with the new machine. She’s taken it back a few times because it gets stuck in a weird loop or just freezes up for no reason. I actually got to witness some of the antics.

We pop the DVD in there. It gives a choice of 15 programs or so that we can use to do something to the DVD with. The top 3 matches (yet not lumped together and not at the top of the list) were “Windows Video Player”, “Windows Media Player”, “Windows Media Center”. We tried one. It froze. We tried another. It froze. We tried the third. It froze. I forgot which one it eventually warmed up to, but seriously, how can a company get away with selling this kind of stuff? If I buy something, I expect it to work.

Needless to say, I will continue to avoid Vista at all costs. I’ll continue to use XP for my HTPC and the Mac for other computing. Microsoft should be embarassed about releasing that troubled bloatware into the wild.

So just who is ZapMedia? Do they really have a case? Or are they just trying to cash in on Apple’s success?

Here’s what I’m really seeing out of this however. Apple releases a wildly popular product with consumers. We’ve come to expect that from Apple. And of course being in the limelight, there are many critical eyes on what Apple releases. “No SDK!” and “No exchange support!” were two biggies that were most often talked about. “The iPhone has no chance going against the BlackBerry without Exchange support.”

What Apple did was genius. They create a simple to use smartphone (with elegant design of course). I don’t even think Apple intended for this to be a BlackBerry competitor. However, they release what they want to release yet leave it flexible enough to add what needs to be added when they hear back from the masses. The masses wanted Exchange support and now each new iPhone will come with it built in. They let the general population do the test marketing and dictate what would be featured in a great product. The first iPhone was no failure by any means, yet after releasing what they wanted for the consumers and then listening to the enterprise wish list, they now have a product for both consumers and business. Genius I say.

I can’t tell you how many times we’d have to design a page, tweak it, pat ourselves on the back and be happy with a clean design only to have IE break the page and turn it into the biggest, ugliest mangled mess ever only because CSS didn’t render properly, proprietary code blew something up, etc.

The thing that really annoyed the crap out of me (and countless others) would be when we’re happily surfing the net on another browser (I mean c’mon…IE is the biggest, most bloated, featureless security threat on your computer. I forbid people from launching IE on my HTPC) when we hit a site that was coded for IE specifically. Granted, it’s poor design and programming on the coder’s end but given most people are on PCs using IE the coder would be lazy and code for IE and IE only. Their laziness (and IE’s improper rendering) caused frustration in millions of people around the world as we try to access a site only to find our (more advanced) browser is not supported.

Microsoft has annoyed the crap out of me over the years with their “we’re the biggest, we can do whatever the hell we want” attitude. However, this looks kinda nifty. I’ll report back to you after I get more feedback…