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Comment on What's the point of Android now?

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Your two complaints are that 1) your phone is slow and old, and 2) a specific app is poorly put together. Somehow, from this, your conclusion is that the entire Android ecosystem is broken/worthless/something.

That's ridiculous, to put it mildly.

Looking past his non-sequitur, it does seem like there's a legitimate issue with this app. The Nexus One isn't that bad of a performer (there are much worse Android phones that can still be bought), and the app doesn't seem, on it's face, to require high specs. Especially since it then redirects him to a web page.

I don't see these posts (and there are a few of them, for every phone, every OS, and every carrier) as people wanting to turn others away from the phone, but rather wanting to turn attention to the flaws. Flaws that can then be fixed by the maker of the system. Nothing turns a company's head faster than bad publicity.

To be perfectly honest, this is more of a straw that broke the camel's back problem. Nearly none of the (seemingly constantly) updated Google Apps provide the same seamless experience they used to. There are huge gaps between the product on the web and the product on your device. Being Google, this kind of stuff is inexcusable.

The Nexus One is old, I'll give you that. As I point out though, this is somehow still the average experience for any Android user. My phone isn't that far behind the top-end Android phones these days.

The phone is not slow and old, the OS is a resource hog. Compare the specs to a Windows phone and see how smoothly it runs with similar hardware.

You have a point. The tighter you can control the hardware, the tighter the integration with the OS will be. Windows Phone, iPhone, game consoles, they can all make due with slower hardware than more general-purpose systems.

Android makes some tradeoffs to give their users choice. It has upsides and downsides, but the true benefit is that people can decide for themselves if they want beefier hardware to run the same relative speed but have more control over the OS, or if they want the other give-and-take. There's less overhead on iOS and WP7, but there's also less control.

I love the market we have right now. There's almost literally something for everyone. I just wish Palm was back in to round it out with WebOS.

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