Apple the Innovator and Rest Followers ?

Before I begin, let me tell you guys that I'm not an Apple fan boy but I couldn't stop myself admiring them for what they've done in the last decade. I was reminded of few forgotten facts about Apple thru news - 'Steve Jobs - CEO Of the decade', to take some time to think about where Apple is and where are its competitors. Here’s what I felt..

Remember the days when we were bombarded with Candybar(Nokia and Sony Ericson) phones and few Windows phones which were wisely called as ‘Windows phones’ and not Smartphones coz they simply weren’t! No one in those days really thought of any innovative products but continued producing similar kind of designs slightly different than the previous ones with slight new features(not spectacular thou)and suddenly Apple announced a phone named – iPhone - The first multi-touch phone! People couldn't believe how something can work without keypad/stylus such flawlessly. And the results were astonishing - Market share of Apple’s iPhone started going up with all other phones losing the market. And then the funny thing happened, all the companies suddenly started coming out with similar phones but with rubbish Operating systems and failed miserably. Until one day when Google decided to jump in and produce something decent(Correction – Bought a company who had produced a decent OS – Android Inc.) which can fight the Apple dominance. Anyway, not getting into any details here, what I want to say is, even today with all the manufacturers along with Google are fighting against Apple’s dominance. The first thing I see on tech sites after a new phone launch is - Comparison with the latest iPhone. Reason? It is still believed to be the best and one to be benchmarked against coz its ease of use makes it more popular. Lets face it guys when we talk about Smartphones, the first phone that comes to our mind is – iPhone.

It is one of the examples thou, same thing happened with iPod and now iPad. The tablet market was considered dead a while ago but with Apple iPad in that field now, it is a new booming market and countless companies started producing tablets and the word iPad killer was coined!

The other day I read that Samsung sold 2 million units of one of their devices and was boasting about it. On the other hand, iPod which has sold more than 237 million units is still running. Nowadays, people wait for June/July to see what Apple's new product is going to be and then the other companies jump in the business to make something competitive to that and nothing new. So basically Apple is being innovative and the rest of the pack is being competitive for their survival. Hence I honestly feel - Apple are innovators and rest are simply followers!

Google Nexus S - Why Google is being a fish in the pond than dominating the mobile industry ?

Couple of weeks back, Google announced its second phone, Nexus S with Samsung. Google shocked the world by launching Nexus one last year by jumping into Mobile industry and this time, after one year and numerous rumours/speculations, everyone was thinking that an extra-ordinary device is in making @ Googleplex.

And when Google announced the device, it disappointed all those people. The reason ? It was obvious, Google launched their second phone much similar to their first one, hardly any changes, same processor(1GHz), same power and everything, in-fact few -ve points. It has no expandable storage and look wise it seems cheap plastic, In all it was shear disappointment!

What is bad is the way Google advertises this phone - 'Be the first one to get the latest OS updates'. So ??? What's the big deal ? It's not like other phones won't get s/w update, it'll just be couple of months after the Nexus S gets it. Let's consider Apple in this respect - When apple launches the new s/w, its just the matter of plugging the phone into your laptop/computer and job done, it doesn't tell you whether its iPhone 2G, 3G or 4 and when you can consume the update. Anyway, leave this part aside and lets look at what's the latest offering in the market hardware wise - a dual core processor, Bluetooth 3.0, HD Media recording/viewing etc. And Google has none of these things in their new phone. The other manufacturers on the other hands like Samsung, LG has considered these new offerings, in-fact LG has just announced a dual-core phone with HDMI output which is atleast twice as fast as Google's Nexus S.

What Google is trying to sell in other words is - a pentium 3 processor offering Windows 7 as against a Windows XP/Vista with a quad-core xeon processor. And I am sure that many of us will go for better and more powerful hardware with a little delay in software update than the latest software and year old hardware!!!