Android Industry News -- Android Going Strong

2.11.11 The Reporter 0 Comments

From breaking out into the market in 2007, to achieving its first wave of market boom in 2009, the Android as an ecosystem may well have matured.

Reaching a market penetration that is poised to supplant Nokia, the Android has rendered several platforms irrelevant or unnoticeable:

• Samsung's Bada OS never really got off the ground, since Samsung became more famous for being the Android phone brand of choice for the mass market.
• The Symbian OS, already riddled with flaws, bugs and malware, may still have its share of fans, but ultimately, the Android had drowned out the buzz of the latest Symbian OS releases. Not even fancy version names could rescue the Symbian from increasingly sinking into oblivion.
• Windows Mobile/Windows Phone. Admittedly, a good number of Microsoft fanatics in the tech community are all praises for the Windows Phone OS, let's face it: the market share of Microsoft-powered devices has been falling, especially since the Android is clearly dominating the market.
• Even the Blackberry is increasingly losing market share, despite being the dominant smartphone in the past. From the iPhone eating through its dominance, and now, with the Android around, pundits are fearing the Research In Motion innovation will go the way of the Palm.
• Nokia is currently so threatened, that despite the fact that it came into a partnership with Microsoft, rumors are circulating about Nokia also venturing into producing Android phones.

There are so many factors as to why the Droid is dominating the market, and one of these may well be the fact that it shares a lot of common apps available for the iOS. This makes the Android platform far more enticing than the Windows Phone ecosystem, or even the Blackberry ecosystem.

In the Philippines, evidence of the Android Platform making major waves is evidenced by the fact that the major telcos are creating their own Android-centric offerings:

• Smart Communications, Inc. has its own line of HTC Android plans.
• Smart also launched its own Android-focused brand, complete with an ecosystem patterned after the BIS/BBM (Blackberry Internet Service/Blackberry Messaging), the Netphone powered by SmartNet.

While Globe didn't seem to make as much waves in the Android arena as much as Smart Communications, here are their most recent developments:

• Globe Telecom launched the Cloudfone, which, at the time it was launched, was the cheapest Android in the market, at Php 4,990 for a prepaid kit, on its launch. It may still be the cheapest 3G-capable Droid to date, as the Cherry Mobile Eclipse 2.2, only Php 91 cheaper, is not 3G-capable.
• Globe is also into developing Android-centric apps. One of these is actually pretty innovative and useful: the Globe Calls for Android lets an Android user take advantage of Globe's call offers without making a user edit his contacts' numbers to affix the different number prefixes that are required for the varying offers. Pretty useful for a fan of those call and text offers.

In all, this is starting to become an Android world. Those who fail to adapt may well be left in the dust.