Google, Android VS Apple, iPhone

 

 

    

 

Google has recently developed Android, a software platform and operating system for mobile devices. The project comes from Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of thirty four companies specialized in software, hardware and telecommunications, like HTC, Motorola, LG or Samsung. Android is an open platform which allows developers to create their own applications, and users to modify the system as they want, adding or suppressing features.

 

By launching Android, Google entered the mobile phone market. Many mobile constructors have already sign with Google to provide this platform with their phones. It was particularly surprising to see that HTC which only sold mobile phones equipped with Windows Mobile, decided to put Android on its mobile phones. All these « smartphones » are competitors for Apple and its iPhone.  

 

Many geeks and bloggers specialized in new technologies try to compare Android and iPhone. As far as I am concerned, I can’t say if it’s better than the iPhone launched this summer by Apple, because I haven’t tested Android nor the iPhone, although some friends of mine told me that some of the applications that you could put on your iPhone were huge and very innovative. For example, there’s an application which recognizes all the music and which gives you the name of a song when you put your iPhone in front of the radio !

 

But after reading some articles on the Internet, I understood that it was difficult to compare Android and iPhone because those products correspond to two different strategies. In an article published in July in the magazine Wired, the journalist said : “Those hoping for a new gadget to rival the iPhone finally understood that Google had something radically different in mind. Apple’s device was an end in itself — a self-contained, jewel-like masterpiece locked in a sleek protective shell. Android was a means, a seed intended to grow an entire new wireless family tree.”

 

If you want to read the whole article, and to learn more about Android, just click here !