UTTERMEDIA

“We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

Motor-mouthed Mac money man Steve Jobs offers his introspective opinion on the imaginary iOS VS Android battle. Explained, he believes an integrated solution will triumph over fragmented multi-manufacturer solutions.

The Android OS is made by one company, to work on a handset made by another. The apps on that handset are tested but not vetted. Apple, however, create the OS and manufacture the handset as well as approving and testing all apps for said device.

Jobs is no stranger to saying one thing and doing the complete opposite. He vowed never to create a tablet device. He quashed rumours of the iPhone. However, his latest and probably throw-away rant goes against his mantra on a deeper level.

A company opposed to the intensive chokeholds of Flash, Apple strive for an open-standard for web and mobile device video. Flash is buggy, closed and bloated. But soon after my switch from iPhone to HTC, I suddenly learned that iOS is/was buggy, closed and bloated. Eg: the “1GHz” iPhone 4 processor is underclocked to 800MHz to prevent overheating. The HTC Desire 1GHz processor doesn’t really need speech-marks.

Openness in product design will bring manufacturers and consumers closer, and the end result with be something that the consumer can enjoy without being hypnotized by marketing, gloss and hype, and just “making do” because the GUI looks nice.

Like I’ve said before, the iPhone is an awesome piece of mobile technology. It brings so many features and experiences which are new to mobile users. These are not new features and new experiences, they are just packaged and marketed in a way that is accessible to the school mum, the technophobe, the toddler. iPhone is closed for that reason - it needs to be solid and straight, perfectly aligned to the needs of a user who wants it to “just work” without questioning why or how.

Android handsets (give or take a few) can do anything the iPhone can do, as good as or better. It’s the OS that really sets it apart. The hundreds of tweaks and options that you discover for weeks after purchasing your new device are just brilliant. Sometimes simple solutions to everyday problems, other times really nice features that you wonder how you coped without.

“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errrr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”

TweetDeck’s CEO responded fairly well to Jobs’ outburst. And good on him too, for the head of a predominatly Apple-targeted social network platform, he didn’t even really need to acknowledge Android. Instead though, he and his team have taken TweetDeck for iOS, thrown away the rulebook, and started right from the bottom up. The two versions, aside from visuals, are a world apart, with features that marry beautifully with the Android interface - features that iOS wouldn’t allow.

There is fervent competition within the industry between Apple and Android, but this blog post (one of many many millions) just goes to show how different both brands are when it comes to user-experience. So the question remains, why try to compete when you’re so different? Android outsold iOS weeks ago, but who’s counting?

10 years from now Jobs will have that Mac market share that he deserves, and perhaps the iOS VS Android dust will have settled, and we’ll have two even more different, honed and unique mobile platforms. And he can retire quietly. Toys in pram.

Let’s get straight down to business. I found the iPhone very restrictive and bland. When you look beneath the beautiful HD graphics and the glossy icons, it’s a simple BIOS. The minimal information and media that Apple actually let you put into the device is filed away exactly where they want it and how they want it….

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Do you remember last year when a relatively unknown journalist said “1950s film makers would never want their movies transfered to HD, which is impossible anyway!”…?

I can’t remember his name, but for about 2 weeks after his article hit the presses it was blogged, reblogged and posted all over the internet and ridiculed beyond relief. Anyone interested in video technology (specifically tech journalists, I would have thought) should know that film is captured in a 2K or 4K resolution… which is more than enough to transfer to 1080p. And of course, if we took our HD technology back in time to Humphrey Bogart, there is no doubt that he would embrace it with excitement and wonder.

Lazy journalism at its finest. Today I tripped over some more. Lazy journalism is a disease - plaguing online news sites and printed media. There is a good reason why these chaps don’t write for tech blogs (Engadget, Gizmodo, Gdgt, Ars Technica). They are entirely past-it and out of touch. What follows is a story on 3G networks taken from the BBC. Written by Rory Cellan Jones. Yeah, who?

So yet another smartphone is about to hit the stores promising unlimited mobile connectivity.

That sentence alone is sounds like the opening of a high school new media project. “Yet another smartphone”… it’s still a fairly limited market only fought by 3 or 4 big players. The technology moves fast and the consumer embraces it knowingly.

No one is promising anything unlimited. Apple, Blackberry, HTC et al all hold a lot back in the way of fulfilling expectations and announcing new technologies. They need to future-proof their own brands and drip-feed features to drum up future investment and possibilities.

The iPhone 4 will do many of the things that Android phones like the HTC Desire can already do - multitasking, flash photography - and Steve Jobs is even promising video calls, apparently convinced this will keep his firm ahead in its increasingly bitter smartphone battle with Google.

There is no smartphone battle with Google. It’s a completely different market, a wholly diverse audience and an entirely different OS. The media like to play the two off against each other probably to sell more magazines and farm more readers. The non-existant smartphone battle would be bitter if perhaps the pie charts and stats weren’t so defamatory.

But remember the first 3G phones in the UK, and how video calls were supposed to be the killer app when they launched? They never took off, perhaps because the 3G networks were just not up to it back then.

They never took off because the handset technology was poor. There was no smartphone. We, as consumers, were not ready for it and didn’t see a place for it in our lives. The Three network used a completely unique and different GSM band for their 3 Video calling, which wasn’t actually too bad it you could bare the VGA colour-banding and microscopic resolution. But hey, at least they tried.

The iPhone may deliver a better experience - but only over wi-fi for now because Apple hasn’t persuaded the networks to play ball. Which brings us to the real problem with all of these smartphones right now - the technology on the phones is still moving ahead faster than the networks on which they run.

You say that like it’s a bad thing? If handset manufacturers weren’t driving the marketplace and so aggressively then the networks wouldn’t even be thinking about developing their own new technologies. That doesn’t equate to a problem with smartphones.

Shunning new technology in cars because our infrastructure is failing would be a similar faux pas.

I am writing this from a business park on the fringes of Oxford, a place where you might expect to have great connectivity. Yet my phone tells me that it is struggling to get any kind of signal, yet alone the 3G I need to make use of its advanced capabilities.

Business parks are built on wasteland near motorway junctions. Phone masts and signal boosters are generally positioned in and around city and rural areas. The question you should be asking is why the hell are you not using Wi-Fi in your Oxford business park? Mobile phone networks can’t just keep building and building masts, especially in areas where they would see little use other than standard calls.

On a side note (a) 3G will be weak in unpopulated and barron areas, but really, do you need to make a video conference call there? Put your phone away and enjoy your holiday (b) city-wide Wi-Fi isn’t too far off.

Jason Cheng and Joshua Topolsky live, breathe and eat technology. The fruits of their labour are highly respected gadget blogs with millions of unique hits. That’s because they do their research and they’re embracing the technology, not cynicising and complaining about an industry struggling to keep up with next-generation mobile computing. Rome wasn’t set up for 3G communication in a day.

Read the full BBC “dot.Rory” (cringe) article here.
Image courtesy of Toy Revolvers. Check out his package here.

In probably the biggest and most clumsy tech-leak to date, the iPhone 4G was stolen, sold, and scrutinised. Full story is here.