More Evidence That the Dell Streak Is Doomed

Really? Dell wants to sell the Streak off contract for more than the base-model iPad? For more on contract than the Droid X, Incredible, and iPhone 4? What a joke!

(Incidentally, the iPhone 4 is probably the best direct price comparison because it too has 16GB of built-in Flash storage, a 5MP rear camera with a VGA quality front facing camera, and a capacitive touchscreen that can actually be used outside in the sun.)

Now, it appears that Dell immediately pulled the blog post revealing this pricing scheme, so maybe this isn’t final. I bet it is, though. This close to launch I imagine all of those contracts have been signed and the deals are done. So, it is almost certainly going to launch sometime soon at $299 on contract and $549 with no contract. By the way, when is it launching anyway, Dell? You said July, but then said not this week? My guess? The original launch date was supposed to be today, some detail is holding it (maybe technical or maybe carrier related), and someone forgot to change the publish date on their blog entry.

In the end, I really think that what kills this product is Android 1.6 with Dell’s terrible skin on top. Really, if they can’t release now with at least 2.1 onboard, what do you think the chances are that you’ll ever get Gingerbread on this thing at the end of the year? Slim-to-none would be my guess. Maybe the delay is that they’re planning to actually actually ship with FroYo, but I doubt it. Dell has made no promises to update it to Gingerbread later this year, they’ve only “promised” FroYo, and they’ve only just recently “shown” 2.1 running on it (kinda, it was a YouTube video where they controlled exactly what was shown and what wasn’t).

I also think it is ridiculous to have a phone that big. To me, anything with a screen bigger than 4″ starts looking like a Jitterbug big-button cell phone for old people. Both the Droid X and the EVO 4G are borderline, as far as I’m concerned. It seems a little like compensating for the inadequacies of the OS (like the keyboard, font rendering, and UI design) by making everything giant-sized. This thing will be impossible to use effectively one-handed. That’s why they’re calling it a tablet. The problem is, that it is too small to really fall into the tablet space, but a little too big to really be a smartphone. It is somewhere in between. That might not kill it (some people might like that tradeoff), but the silly skin and old OS really does kill it, IMHO.

The skins need to die.

People like to equate Android to Windows, and iOS to Macs. Unfortunately, the way Google is running Android, I think a closer analogy would be to equate Android to the old UNIX platforms (or maybe desktop Linux). Every phone works slightly different. Just because you know how to use Android with HTC’s Sense, doesn’t mean you know how to use a Droid with Motoblur. Plus, many phones are stuck on old versions. FroYo has been out for a month now and still has less than 2% market share in recent numbers! Every manufacturer loads it up with a different skin (all of which are pretty crappy except for maybe Sense). When you buy a new device, you sometimes really can’t count on getting any upgrades to the core OS at all. Even with the “flagship” products, there’s been little evidence that these manufacturers are going to support them with OS upgrades for longer than 10-14 months, and even what you do get from them will be painfully behind (and often with a broken skin layered on top). That feels a lot like Linux or UNIX. Sure, they’re all POSIX based, but it makes a pretty big difference if you’re running Solaris, Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, or even OSX!

Back in the early days, Windows may have had terrible crapware issues stemming from manufacturer desire to “differentiate” their products (and still does, really). But if you bought a Windows 98 computer, it was a Windows 98 computer. Sure, Packard Bell might have put some multimedia crapware over top of it, and special wallpapers and sound schemes and stuff, but it wasn’t fundamentally different. If you wanted to get the base OS back, all you needed was a little time spent in the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel widget (or worst-case, a Windows 98 disc which you could pick up at thousands of retail stores). You didn’t have to resort to hacking the thing and downloading sketchy builds from random websites. It didn’t void your warranty. It wouldn’t all-but-guarantee problems when the next service pack of Windows came out, or the next bug-fix patch.

This is something Apple really gets. You buy an iPhone, and know that you’ll get all the new versions of iOS for free and without serious delay for effectively two full years. Two years, not coincidentally, matches the length of the standard cell phone contract. This is almost never reported by the “gadget punditocracy” because all of these guys (the Engadget, Gizmodo, GDGT, BoyGenius folks, and even Leo Laporte) don’t care. They won’t still be using the same phone in two years! Heck, the people on the Engadget Mobile podcast (which is fantastic, by the way) talk like they’re amazed they’re still using a Nexus One that is six months old! If you buy an iPhone today, you know that you’re going to get a bunch of new features over the course of the two year contract. More importantly, the developers know that you’ll be able to upgrade to the same stable platform. Most people don’t get new phones until their contract expires. Period. End of story. So how the phone works and compares to the competition one and a half years down the road matters very much. How’s that G1 looking today?

On a recent episode of MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte made the false analogy discussed above (iOS like MacOS, Android like Windows). He, of course, like many Android fanboys, used all kinds of false and made-up numbers to support his theory. For example, Leo, Android does not have more market share in the US market than the iPhone. Not even close, my friend. Android was at 13% versus Apple at 24.4% as of May 10th (and that was before the iPhone 4 launch). It is growing more quickly, but when you are growing from nothing, that is no surprise, and those numbers don’t even begin to count the iPad and iPod Touch sales and installed base!

What you are remembering, Leo, was a bunch of reports from the beginning of the year that more Android phones had sold during that quarter than iPhones had sold. That doesn’t mean that Android has a bigger market share total! It just means that they were selling more phones at that particular moment in time. This was no surprise to anyone paying attention, though. Apple’s iPhone was 9 months old in Q1 of 2010! Everyone knew they were going to launch a new one in June or July (I fielded multiple questions about this from non-tech-savvy friends and relatives way back in March and April).

So, let’s review: You have a bunch of brand new phones from a wide variety of manufacturers and a wide variety of carriers outselling a single, 9-month-old phone from a single manufacturer on a single carrier. Plus, literally everyone knew that Apple was going to be coming out with a new phone at some point during the summer. And, on top of that, the quarters we were looking at were Q1 and Q2, which don’t include the two most important cellphone sales periods there are in a year (back-to-school and Christmas). Well, I would sure as hell hope Android would win that battle! If they can’t pull that off, then they might as well just give up. Let’s see how those sales figures work out for the whole year, and how the market share numbers look like after the next two quarters of selling the iPhone 4, why don’t we?

In the end, I really think there is more room in the phone market than there was in the early PC market, but even if you assume that it will follow something resembling the same trajectory, I’d say it is a lot more likely that iOS is the Windows of the mobile market. It is far more monolithic. It has a wider availability because of the iPod Touch and iPad (something Leo completely ignored). And, just like Windows, it has far better game support and more professional developers.

Does any of this mean I hate Android? Heck no! I really, really, really want Android to succeed. I’m very much looking forward to the ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC and I couldn’t be happier that they dumped Windows Embedded Compact 7 for Android (please, please, please give us vanilla Android, ASUS). I would choose it over Windows Phone 7 and HP/Palm’s WebOS as a good duopoly competitor to iOS any day! It is the open alternative, and I would much prefer an open alternative to having two monolithic closed competitors. But I think all of these people comparing iOS to Macs and Android to Windows and looking for the future duopoly (with one side dominating with 80-90% of the market) are just stuck in the past. Just because Microsoft took over the world and built an unstoppable monopoly, doesn’t mean that every operating system of the future will fall into the same pattern (especially not one run like Android). It is far more likely that we will end up with an oligopoly. Three or four strong top competitors driving the market and commanding the vast majority of the market, with a variety of niche players at the bottom for the more esoteric users.

Either way, no one really knows. We will have to wait to find out. But for now, all the talk about Apple’s untimely failure seems decidedly premature.