> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch.
It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price.
If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
Or they just need to accept a lower gross margin than the ~50% Apple gets.
There expensive one, the Galaxy Player 5, cost more than Apple's offering.
And they all ran Android 2.3
Similarly, there was Archos. They made a whole family of Android player devices at the 2.3 era, and where infamously buggy.
Sony made the Walkman Z as a phoneless counterpart to the Xperia Z. It was $250. Supposedly a fantastic device, but that's not really undercutting Apple very well when Apple was selling iPod 4 devices for less.
I mean, Black Friday doorcrashers this year were iPod 4 at $130. I can't think of any android counterpart I'd want at that price. Maybe Motorola can figure out a phoneless Moto G with the right nudge from Google.
A big problem is also marketing - these companies are only now figuring out how to market their handheld devices in the carrier-controlled countries since up until then they just handed the devices off to carriers and maybe put up a few ads.
Meanwhile, Apples had their own stores.
Samsung could stop shoving money into ads and could start putting together coherent store-displays of their non-carrier product line. Sony should revive their store-brand too - they were Apple back when Apple made beige boxes. Sony could be Apple again - they've stopped the race to the bottom and seem to be investing in quality. I'd love to see Sony put together a coherent adversary for Apple using the Android/Win8 ecosystems. They even have the kind of market breadth and to put together a counter to the iTunes/App Store with their gaming and media holdings.
I'd love to see Sony take on Apple in making quality well-designed equipment and metal laptops. Even if Sony is just as bad as (if not worse than) Apple on IP law.
Which leaves the devices we see as sadly inevitable.
Minus someone with the power/resources of, say, Amazon or Microsoft, doing it carriers-be-damned.
Though I'm still not sure why Apple is so slow to this party. A $300 "iPod Touch With SIM slot" sounds like a great product for an awful lot of overseas markets. (Where a considerable amount of their sales and growth are.) Though maybe that's where the 5C experiment is going.
My phone is a Samsung Focus, which came out a year before the G-Nex. I'm surprised the G-Nex gave you so much trouble.