As today marks the end of the Summer of 2009 and the beginning of the Fall I wanted come out of posting hibernation to revisit the Summer of Android Love predictions.
I felt this Summer brought great momentum for Android as manufacturers, especially Motorola, and developers are really attaching themselves and believing in Android to deliver for them as we head toward the Holiday Season.
The Summer predictions I made in June was mostly on target with a lot hinging on a stable Donut release and mass distribution of capable Android phones toward the end of the year.
- Five of the planned 18 Android phones will debut this Summer
- Android Will Dominate in China Illegal or Otherwise
- Android Market Overhaul
- Android App-vertising Takes Off
- Android 2.0 Donut Will be Released by the End of the Summer
- The myTouch 3G Will Compete with the iPhone 3GS this Summer
- Android Will Outspeed the iPhone 3GS
- Flash Will be Android Ready AFTER the Summer
- Android Sites Further Collaboration
- A GoogleAndBlog Android Widget
This summer the MyTouch3G at least debuted in the US while the Samsung Galaxy, HighScreen PP420, & HTC Hero debuted in Europe while the Lenovo Ophone emerged in China. Interestingly there looks to be approximately 40 Android phones available in the near future according to my Android phone list.
The Lenovo Ophone is making inroads for China Mobile as China Telecom will compete against it with its own Android phone the Access CPhone.
Overhauling The Android Market is a major piece of the Donut Android release which has already been provided to developers and those that update their Android ROM especially from Cyanogen, but it looks like the general public will have to wait until October for the general release even those with the G1 Dream phone.
There is definitely a pick up in Android applications being made and distributed but the actual monetization and app-vertising from them is still currently sluggish. It is expected that the Donut release improvements to The Android Market may cattle prod some movement there.
Donut was released this Summer to developers and those that have root access to their phone to update it themselves. Also as Ross McAusland commented below Donut is now officially the 1.6 while Eclair is 2.0 since the predictions were made in June when Donut was tentatively aligned with the 2.0 release.
The myTouch 3G sales have been good but I feel it would be stretch to say its directly competing with the iPhone 3GS.
Until Android phones start using the Qualcomm SnapDragon processor and boost the on-board RAM & ROM they will still lag the iPhone 3GS in regards to overall speed.
Flash capability is available in a limited fashion via manufacturers Android modifications such as HTC Sense but full support for all Android phones is still lacking.
This was displayed this summer with the first annual Android Network Awards that included many Android sites from all over the world.
Justin at nEx.Software created and distributed the Google And Blog Android widget this Summer.
Although there is an Android Widget sending Google And Blog posts to your phone there has been a gap of posts for over 2 weeks.
I didn’t want to post the same things all the other Android sites already did and burp out something similar just for the sake of creating a post so I went into a self induced posting hibernation.
I have also been traveling and speaking at conferences such as at WordCamp LA and again shortly at SMX East in New York City in October.
I will be speaking on Android applications at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan so I should be posting here some tidbits of interesting and relevant information leading up to that panel.
