Samsung should have been content slipping under Google's radar and riding that wave. I can't see how poking the Google beast is a good idea.
Everyone playing "nice" with Google is losing money and/or insignificant. They're going down the same road that the PC vendors went down playing by Microsoft's rules. It looked like a different game at the outset because Google wasn't charging them an $80 tax on each device. But the end result is the same, they are being commoditized into irrelevance.
By placing their apps on iOS, and essentially being the best of breed in every category, the long game seems to be to relegate Apple into the realm of the Android OEM. When it comes time for average iOS consumer to replace his phone, if Google have managed to push enough apps on him, he probably cares more about them than iOS. If Google can play it right, they might be able to make choosing a phone choosing your favourite front for Google apps, with no revenue difference either way.
They're not there yet, but it looks like they want to be. If Samsung, Apple, whoever has market share don't move fast, and Google play it right, they could all become fronts for Google's apps. And then the market share just shifts around between the current best front for Google's apps.
They are good but not significantly better than Apple's built in ones. Apple Maps may have less quality data but has a much better UI and uses a lot less data. Google Now is pointless compared to the genuinely useful Android version. Chrome is slower in most cases than Safari and not integrated with the rest of the OS. And really all their other apps simply aren't popular.
Unfortunately Apple just doesn't give third party apps any room to expand beyond its tiny little sandbox.
I guess I'll agree to disagree here. Apple's first party apps significantly behind Google's in my opinion.
> Unfortunately Apple just doesn't give third party apps any room to expand beyond its tiny little sandbox.
This is unfortunate, but it looks like Google is working hard to make its own applications interop nicely and directly, even with the limited capability iOS provides for this.
Care to elaborate?
Any major apps I'm missing?
"...they could all become fronts for Google's apps." Which would, IMHO, be disastrous for consumers and the open web. Google already have far too much control in the web space, getting close to ubiquity. Samsung, at this juncture, are the lesser of two evils. However, I wouldn't trust them as far as I could spit.
Is that really true? I like Thinkpads, but not for the "ThinkVantage" features. In fact, the first thing I do when I buy a Lenovo laptop is remove all the stuff that "differentiates" them. I just want a computer, not "an experience".
It's the brand that matters. Motorola's is pretty beat up and is losing a lot of money every quarter even after Google bought it. I doubt Samsung warming up to Google will stop it from marketing the next Razr phone anyway.
Also, much of Chrome's success among non-geeks came from default bundling and installation with Flash, Acrobat Reader and Java updates, not from Google's marketing. A lot of Firefox users that I had moved from IE during the IE7 days had no idea how they ended up with Chrome on their machine.
>Samsung should have been content slipping under Google's radar and riding that wave. I can't see how poking the Google beast is a good idea.
I don't think it's as easy for Google to sell tens of millions of phones as you think it is. They've had some major screwups with hardware like the Google TV, Nexus Q etc.
AFAIK Google has never released their own hardware for Google TV. Hopefully this changes but it's probably not fair to lump the shitpool that is Google TV hardware in with Google's hardware faults (of which the Nexus Q really seems to be the only one, maybe the Xoom as well?).