Mainstream Media = Epic Fail

FANBOY
1. A passionate fan of various elements of geek culture

That's what most people will probably say about me when it comes to Android. Since it's debut I've been preaching about how great Android is, how much of a game changer it is to the mobile market place. I preordered the G1 as soon as it was announced and I've followed Android development since then. It's not all I follow though. I follow Blackberry development, iPhone development, very rarely Palm development, so I try to get a scope of what everyone is doing out there. I've been in mobile telecom for almost 10 years now and I've seen innovation after innovation. I remember the first Palm Pilot phone, when the first mp3 capable phone came to the US, the first color screen phone. My day usually starts with coffee in the morning while I browse through the tech blogs to see if anything new and exciting is out and I look forward to seeing reports from CES every year.

Recently, Google announced and started selling the Nexus One, it's the flagship Android 2.1 phone. It's not an iPhone killer, I really hate that term because not even a new iPhone will be an iPhone killer. It's a step in the right direction though for mobile evolution. One of my daily blog readings, the great guys over at Android and Me, posted a story this morning about mainstream media and their view of the Nexus One. It comes from a site called Newsy, where they basically take reports from all the mainstream news outlets and give you the Cliff's notes on what's going on. If you'd like to take a look at what's being said, and sound off on the media's inability to report on a tech product, hit me up after the break...

The video is posted below for your viewing pleasure, but lets just look at a few highlights from it. One of the analysts from CNBC says the Nexus can't compete with the iPhone because of the Apple App Store. Seriously, here's word for word what he said,

“People aren’t buying a phone because it has a cool screen. The reason why people are buying an iPhone or any device for that matter is these apps. And the numbers that Pete was going through, that’s 10 million apps a day are being downloaded for the iPhone. So Google can come out with whatever they want, they have 20,000 apps in their store, Apple has about 125,000. People are doing great things with their phone, and this just doesn’t change the landscape.”

I'm not sure who this analyst is, but maybe he should put things in perspective. Android has been out a little over a year, that's 20,000 apps in a year. The iPhone was launched in June of 2007, so a little over 2 years. iPhone has abeen on the market longer so of course they will have more apps. Apple is on 3.0 of their OS while Android is now on 2.1, more developers will start to see what can be done on Android and development will pick up now the phone is becoming more mainstream. It took a year before another carrier besides T-Mobile picked up Android in the US, and yes I know the iPhone has only one official carrier in the US, but it's AT&T, they were number one in subscribers at the time.

Now, regarding people buying phones for apps, a lot of users will buy a phone because of the apps that can be used on them, but there are still people out there that will buy it for what it is and could care less about the apps. Just like I see people with Blackberries every day who never use email on their device because they don't know how, I'm sure there are people who don't use apps on the iPhone. Why? Because they want the status symbol. They buy the device because they want people to see their phone and assume they must be cool or important based on the device they carry.

Mainstream media needs to step up and start reporting on devices for what they can do, not what they can't do. Every story so far I've seen that hasn't come from an enthusiast web site compares the phone to the iPhone but only talks about the snap dragon processor and voice search. I have a G1, running android 1.6, and I can do voice search, how long has 1.6 been out? Hey news media! Lets mention the NEW features in this phone. How about the new home screen, we went from having 3 in stock android to having 5, or the living wallpapers, that's a cool feature. Especially when the iPhone doesn't even have wallpapers. How about Googles new Genie Widget that combines news and weather into one widget and works off your location? Google Maps with Navigation that was available on the Droid with Android 2.0. Where are all those reports?
So enough with my rant, take a look at the video below for the story that started this rant, and while we are at it, maybe we should contact the news media outlets and tell them we actually want tech geeks and fanboys to start doing the stories on new things.