Are you shitting me? I told my brother in law who drives trucks for a living (very non-geeky) about Android and 48 hours later he had hacked his HT Touch from Sprint to run a dev version of Android. He hates the baked in OS and absolutely loves Google's OS even with massive bugs (due to the hack) I told him in a year he's see dozens of phones with Android pre installed and he's already looking to ditch his months-old phone because of it.
That's not evidence, it's just a story. I could offer a better OS than most phones, and a good percentage of people would switch. What the people like is not 'android', it's multitouch, organisation and so on. If people really jump on the UI bandwagon, whoever wrote the OS in the phone will make their own OS look that way too. What does Android offer then?
Maybe I'm wrong - we'll see in a couple of years. But looking at things from the perspective of now, Google has bungled this big time. OS Platforms are a market with a lot of money behind it, and the mobile OS market has people with money that can rival googles and a lot more experience.
Google can win if the people want Android. And right now, the people don't care.
I can match your anecdote with one of my own - a geeky friend of mine wanted to get a new phone. He liked Android, since it would be like the iPhone but more open. He waited, and then that fugly phone came out. And a few weeks later, Nokia came up with a phone with just as nice an interface, but with well designed hardware. He went with Nokia.
That phone has gotten pretty good reviews. It's also the first effort from a small company. Large ones like Motorola begin enthusiastically shipping their first models very soon.
your 'very non-geeky' brother managed to hack a smartphone and uses a dev version of Android?
Ask him to send in his resume... we're hiring truck-driving hackers in here!
