What I hear when someone goes on about their Android phone:
I need you to buy what I bought so I can feel like it was a good idea because I’m not sure and I hate those smug Apple people because they don’t bug me to buy an iPhone because they don’t want me to have one because they don’t like me/think I’m cool enough/give a rat’s ass and that makes me want to get anything that isn’t an iPhone so I can show them I don’t care and you should totally get one look it’s got 4G that you can’t use without killing your battery but you can carry an extra one that you can’t do with the iPhone because they don’t have 4G or you could add this extra battery pack that makes your phone really big and it has HDMI so you can play movies on your tv since android doesn’t have AirPlay but whatevs cables are cool everyone has hdmi and it has a microSD card which is cool cuz it’s not like your phone is a networked device you could transfer files with and you should totally get one before the next OS release drops and you hafta wait for your carrier to make it available.
All this angst is about a phone. I don’t think cars or even guns, back when survival was dependent on them, elicited so much noise. There’s probably a word for the inverse relationship between fetishism and utility.
I dunno. I see a lot more fanboy wanking about cars and guns than phones, still. How many monthly magazines are there devoted entirely to phones, compared to the number there are for cars and guns?
As for hdmi vs airplay, I’ll take a $5 cable over a $99 AppleTV, thanks. Or do TVs come with Airplay receivers now? Not that I’ve ever used that feature more than once, mind you, because I have a media server in the closet that can stream to my xbox. Which, come to think of it, my phone can too. Maybe an iPhone can act as a UPnP server as well. *shrug* I don’t particularly care about that feature.
Sent from my iPad
(Not really sent from my iPad, of course, but I do have one on loan from work, and like it a lot. The audio APIs are objectively better than Android’s, for one.)
“I dont care about that feature” sums up a lot of the alleged Android advantages for me. I think inductive charging is the only thing that appeals. The Airplay business underscores the ecosystem advantage, or in economic terms, switching costs.
I guess your question about TVs and AirPlay receivers makes me ask, where are the Google TVs or maybe an app for the roku or TiVo or Xbox? Netflix runs on those platforms, after all.
I believe the roku and xbox have built in UPnP/DLNA renderers, so they’ll work with anything that provides that service, including many android devices. Don’t know about tivos, although I think they use their own proprietary protocol. Like Apple does. Which is do say, if I have a roku or xbox, I don’t need a separate app or device to stream media from my server or phone.
And I think that’s the fundamental difference between the two ecosystems. Apple’s take is “if everything you use comes from us, it will all work”. Android’s is “if everything you use conforms to these open standards, it will all work”. I personally prefer the latter approach, but I can see what might be attractive about the former.
If it all works. Which it doesn’t always. There are standards and then there are implementations and sometimes there is even design and usability research.
And yes, I knew there was a Google TV product but you wouldn’t know it from the marketplace. I don’t know if I would buy an AppleTV now. I’ve had it for some time and there weren’t a lot of competing products.
What’s odd about the Apple/Google thing is the slagging Apple gets, that all their products are derivative and easy but at the same time how hard it seems to be (Jelly Bean or perhaps it’s predecessor were the first Android releases with good/non-laggy touchscreen response, from what I read). Google does a lot of things well, but they really don’t compete in the same areas or offer a lot of the same services. And consider that Safari and Chrome share the same renderer. Apple’s engineering must not be *too* bad…
And if you don’t already have a device which can stream UPnP/DLNA to your TV, you can get one for the same price point as an AppleTV: http://www.google.com/tv/get.html — was “where are the Google TVs” a (completely fair) jab at Google TV’s perceived market failure, or did you not know they existed?