

Brad Feld ditches his iPhone - rfrey
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/open-android-vs-closed-iphone.html

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brk
He lists his reasons in the following order:

 _AT &T service_

Yes, AT&T service has been pretty shitty. It's hard to make this a direct
knock against the iPhone, even recognizing the exclusive deal. I believe that
Apple is pushing AT&T to fix this issue in one way or another. Though it has
been taking way too long. Still, I don't consider this a pure iPhone issue.

 _major limitations in some of the applications such as email_

Really? Have you truly tried some of the Android apps, Brad? The default email
client on the Moto Droid I had for a month didn't even support signatures.
Many of the other apps I downloaded and tried were half-baked at best. Some
were targeted towards specific handsets, others just didn't perform as
advertised. There have been very very few iPhone apps that I've downloaded
that didn't do what they advertised (note: I also read app reviews first. If
the majority of the reviews are 1 or 2 stars I skip it.). My personal
experience was that Android apps were fairly poor as a whole, though there
were some really good apps too.

 _restriction of Flash_

Until I see true working version of mobile Flash, I don't blame Apple for not
including it. I've never felt slighted by my iPhone not supporting Flash.

 _lack of tethering_

This is, again, a carrier issue. So, you're not really comparing handsets,
you're comparing carrier restrictions. Again, I get the exclusivity part, but
this isn't really an iPhone limitation.

 _lack of statefulness, lack of multi-processing_

Yeah, these bug me at times also. Though not significantly, and my Droid ATE
the battery if I tried to multitask an app that did a lot of background
network activity. So again, I'm not sure this is true iPhone issue as much as
an overall technology issue.

 _and the unbearable shittiness of iTunes for Windows_

What about the unbearable shittiness of Windows in general?

Sorry, but I put less merit into someone who switches products after getting
one as schwag. I thought my Droid sucked and wasn't worth what I paid for it.
If it had been free, I may have been more tolerant of it and wooed by the
novelty factor.

~~~
oldgregg
I don't even know where to begin. Apple is the one that made the decision to
stay with ATT so it's their own damn fault. As Apple loves to say, it's the
end user experience that matters. Apple has stuck by ATT for two reasons:
Control and Money. At a severe cost to users.

You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just
laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will
probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant.

~~~
halostatue
You may not know where to begin with your comments about the Apple and AT&T
relationship, but that would mostly be because you Don't Get It. It's not just
about control and money; these matter, but less than you think.

By choosing AT&T, Apple chose GSM, which gave the iPhone compatibility with
most of the world. They looked at CDMA and realized that it was a dead-end
technology; they looked at the expense of having to maintain two different
radio chipsets; they looked at a lot of things and made the decision that, at
least up until now, they didn't want to deal with it. Apple has relationships
with three GSM carriers in Canada (Rogers/Fido, Bell, and Telus) and many more
elsewhere in the world. If T-Mobile had used the more common GSM frequencies,
Apple might not have gone with an exclusive deal with AT&T. Maybe.

On the other hand, my immediate reaction on seeing the story title was "who is
Brad Feld and why should I care that he's switching?"

Seriously. Looking at his CrunchBase profile, I can see that he does VC stuff
now and built a fairly large consulting company, but I am still not sure that
I should care about his opinions about consumer electronics. So I _do_ think
that his opinion has less merit because he got this particular device for
free. (Money isn't credibility. To me, he's just some random guy with a
platform. A blogger with no relevance to anything that I do.)

IMO, a consumer who has loyalty to a particular device or technology is a
fool. If someone really comes up with something that I can unequivocally say
is better than my iPhone, I will switch. So far, Android is "close but no
cigar".

~~~
megablast
You are completely wrong. The expense of maintaining two different radios is
nothing compared to the extra millions of devices they would have sold. This
is so wrong that it is embarrassing that people use this as a point.

How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen
engineers to get it all working??

~~~
brk
_How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen
engineers to get it all working??_

My experience with embedded hardware type startups would lead me to think you
would pretty much double your FCC registration process/expenses, add about 50%
overhead to your QA budget to basically test everything twice, add about 20%
to your hardware layout budget (unless the two chips are highly pin and form-
factor compatible), and a few other incidentals. On top of the other extra
basic engineering code to "get it all working".

Then of course you also have to WANT to have the unit on the carrier that you
added the CDMA chipset for in the first place.

The harder part to gamble on in a situation like this is: how many people will
switch carriers to get a truly hot device? If you get it right (as Apple has
appeared to), a large majority of people will pick the phone over the carrier.
I'm sure they would have sold more iPhones to date than the current number if
they had a CDMA version, but I'm not convinced it would have been a truly
significant number overall.

Anyway, that's my rough experience with hardware design. What's your
perspective on the added costs?

~~~
drivebyacct
It's so expensive, they're not coming out with a CDMA iPhone this year.

Oh wait. They are? Huh. They must just have decided that the masses want
iPhones. If they have to lose money on them... oh wait, you mean that isn't
how business works?

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jsz0
It's great to have competition. For my needs Android is still a little too
clunky in the UI department. I use it but I don't enjoy using it. Lots of
simple things are made far too complex. For instance setting the action of
plugging in a USB cable each time (or risking data corruption by not un-
mounting the SD card) Using multiple e-mail clients because I have GMail and a
separate IMAP server setup. The menu/back/home/search button setup is a bit
awkward to me. Why have these extra buttons when you have a big touchscreen? I
don't really like switching between the touchscreen and physical buttons
constantly. It's not a smooth experience.

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WillyF
We'll see whether he sticks with Android over the next few months or switches
back. Even though he has some good reasons for switching, I think it really
comes down to the fact that he got two free phones and might as well give them
a try.

Also, as an investor, Brad can better do his job if he's familiar with both
platforms. He doesn't really get at that in the post, but it seems to me that
it should be an important concern for him.

------
melling
I'm getting a little tired of this "open" vs. "closed" debate.

Someone should ask Richard Stallman what he thinks about writing C# on
Windows. There's only one platform on which the millions of lines of C# using
Window's CLR are going to run well. Truly open means your software can run
anyway, with a bit of effort. Mac software doesn't port well to Windows,
native Windows software doesn't port well to Linux. Mac and Windows are walled
gardens, they're just bigger gardens.

~~~
zmmmmm
> I'm getting a little tired of this "open" vs. "closed" debate.

That's because it's not a debate. This isn't something that we are sitting
around arguing about in the abstract. It's an actual real ongoing issue in the
real world that affects people. The "debate" will go away when the issue goes
away - either because Apple changes their policy or they get marginalised and
turned into a minority player like they are in every other market. It looks to
me like the latter is going to be what happens, but it didn't have to be that
way.

~~~
protomyth
"like they are in every other market" - last I checked, the iPod is doing
pretty good.

The debate is happening with people who need things that the most of the
people buying cellphones don't need. Will Apple modify its policies?
Maybe,they have in the past. I think it more likely they will add carriers in
the US before changing their policies. I really believe the last thing they
want is the type of app on the iPhone / iPad that Mac's gets from Adobe.

~~~
jarek
Best-selling industry-standard applications?

~~~
protomyth
I think the "fake" interface ways more heavily on Apple's thoughts then sales
numbers.

------
joubert
I'm having iphone/flash/android fatigue.

~~~
Batsu
I was thinking earlier today how useless and tired these topics have become.
Mentioning any of the three has too much potential to spark arguments that
quickly devolve into gadget he said/she said. I don't know how anyone can read
these with interest.

On a related note, can we just accept that some of these big name people will
switch devices and we don't need to hear about it? They have the same
complaints as everyone else, so does it really matter?

</brief rant and probably karma>

~~~
drivebyacct
Especially since everyone has their opinion which is in some way tainted by
which phone they have, which platform they like, or ultimately what things are
more important to them day-to-day. Fundamentals and ideology - they will
likely side Android. If it's all about UX then its Apple. There are merits to
debate still and there are interesting arguments about how it will affect
their market share, but everyone in these topics has pretty much already made
up their mind. The conversation plays out the same way everytime...

------
cubicle67
Where is Microsoft in all of this? We're almost at iPhone OS 4.0 and Android
2.2 and in the same time Microsoft have managed to ship one minor upgrade
(6.5) and talk a bit about how great 7 will be.

~~~
Batsu
Much like the search industry, this isn't exactly Microsoft's forte[1]. I
think they see the benefit in shipping something fresh, given that they're not
exactly at risk of going much lower.

1: <http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013> (see table 2)

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jpcx01
I'm in the same camp. Loved the iPhone when it came out, then it slowly wore
me down. Switch to the Droid was huge for me, and I cant even imagine using an
iPhone again. As a hacker, droid just "feels better". More open, hackable, and
solves almost all my key frustrations with iPhone (doubt I need to repeat them
here, as they've been gone over to death).

iPhone is something I'd recommend to my mom. A droid is something I'd
recommend to a coworker.

------
perpetuity
And today I had a healthy bowel movement, followed with gas all dat.

