No Pressure on Google Android
The weather is turning cooler in Silicon Valley. Soon we will be seeing advertisements for Christmas mixed in with the ads for the next U.S. President. Christmas ads in October are always annoying. It seems like the pressure to have a happy holiday is forced on us earlier and earlier.
This same feeling of annoyance greeted me when I read the latest predictions for the Google Android phone. To the best of my knowledge, there is currently only one phone set for release before the Christmas holiday, but the analysts are already predicting a happy holiday for Google. Actually the prediction is not just happy, it is ecstatic. They are predicting that 4% of all smartphones sold in the U.S. during the fourth quarter will be the HTC Dream, the first commercial Google Android phone. That translates into 400,000 phones.
Now, 400,000 phones are certainly doable. Apple averages 27k 3G iPhones/week, down from a high of 50k/week. Apple’s sales are averaging 324k/quarter. But the question is how will users feel about the Android phone.
The iPhone has an entire ecosystem behind it. From the iTunes store to phone itself, it is a very controlled, managed device. It is not that people can’t handle the iPhone technology themselves, they don’t want to. Thanks to the stripped down iPhone, people are discovering for the first time all the amazing things that a phone can do. But phones have been able to do most of these things for years. They just had such a terribly variable user interface that it was impossible for people to figure them out without putting hours into the learning process.
If the HTC Dream is a very intuitive device, this might work. Otherwise, it will not be a happy Christmas.