Android Smartphone Sales Go Over 50%!

[Uccmal]

So, to remain relevant device providers will need to duplicate or buy rimm's enterprise service.

 

You mean the service that crashes for days on end? Yeah, people love that.

 

That sort of proves my point.  Power goes out everywhere in the world from time to time and people dont go apoplectic.  The reason it gets front page news is because rimm has been so integral to government and business development.  You aren't going to hear about Apple or Android secure systems crashing because they dont exist.  People who need to 99.99%assurance of uptime use other systems anyway and always have (military comes to mind). 

[Guest valueInv]

Obviously, i cannot predict Apple's decline except that their closed style of operating will turn people off. 

 

In summary, all this makes for good intellectual fodder but as a value investor I wouldn't bet big on any outcome.

 

That's the point I'm trying to make. We.don't.know. We didn't know that Steve Jobs would one day return and turn Apple around. We didn't know that Lou Gerstner would succeed in turning around IBM. We didn't know that one day RIMM would be in a position it is in today nor Nokia. We didn't know that a search engine company would build a mobile OS that would dominate or that people going to a website to post what they had for breakfast would be one of the biggest things ever. That's why Buffet was right to stay away from tech. I'm guessing he is comfortable with IBM because it is so diversified that many unhandicapable things could go wrong and they would still be fine.

 

This is especially true with a company as secretive, surprising and unconventional as Apple. 

[DCG]

 

their closed style of operating will turn people off

 

People have been saying that for about 30 years, and that is usually said by people who don't understand Apple's business.

 

And while people like to talk about how much more secure blackberries are, can you name some examples of when there have been big security breaches of iPhones and Android phones?

[DCG]

WSJ review of the Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich:

http://online.wsj.co...3319145676.html

 

So, they're now integrating more menu options onto the screens in apps (reducing the use of the Menu button), you can create folders by dragging apps onto other apps, and you can now press 2 buttons to capture screenshots. It's like Google's Android development team just sits around with iPhones and tries to replicate them. They've added some good features with Ice Cream Sandwich, but I wish they'd come up with something original, rather than constantly trying to clone the iPhone.

 

I think this is the first step in trying to remove the use of the menu, search, and back buttons from Android devices (making it even more like the iPhone/iPad), as the buttons make Android tablets more difficult to use. Apple designed iOS to work on tablets and phones early on, while Android is now working backwards to try to make their OS compatible for both devices.

 

Windows' phones are a huge mess and very unintuitive, but at least they're actually trying to come up with their own design.

[Guest valueInv]

Here's an update on how Apple is competing at Verizon:

 

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-verizon-moved-4.2-million-iphones-in-q4-but-costs-higher-than-expected/

 

 

Verizon sold 4.2M iPhones vs 3.5M of Android + Blackberry + other smartphones. This is without a free iPhone 3GS offering.