My Android Is Better Than Yours

By opensourcing the Android OS, Google on one hand intended to free phone manufacturers from dealing withe the boring, difficult and extremely expensive operating system layer in mobile phones. I should say mobile computers, or wearable computers, not mobile phones. And on the other hand they intended to give them a way to differentiate.

The common wisdom is there are differences between subsequent releases of Android. The Ice Cream Sandwich is better than the Honeycomb and the Honeycomb is better than the Gingerbread. True. Each is a successor to the previous one, so it is natural the newer versions are better. But what most consumers / users are not aware of is there are even bigger differences between, say, the Gingerbread delivered by Samsung and the Gingerbread delivered by Sony.

I can compare the two, because I had been using the Sony Xperia Pro for several months and then I switched to the Samsung Galaxy Note. And in short: Samsung beats Sony hands down.

Generally I hate bloatware. By this term I mean all the device manufacturer specific software supplies on top of the underlying operating system. Usually this is just crap. And my first reaction is always to get rid of everything not supplied by Microsoft (for desktop / laptop) or Google (for phone / tablet). Apple steers away from the problem by controlling the entire platform. And this is on of the reasons people like them. Windows and Android, being open environments, customized by hardware vendors, require users to pull all the weeds right after unpacking.

Unfortunately with Android it ain't that easy. Before the Ice Cream Sandwich the only way to clean the OS was to root the device and cut the files. Not for the feint hearted. ICS allows disabling of any app. But with the Gingerbread, for instance, rooting the device was my first steps after unpacking the Sony Xperia. And root access I needed only to get rid of the Sony doubtful apps, crippling the overall experience.

So imagine my surprise when I actually found the Galaxy Note firstly quite clean and secondly whatever Samsung put in by themselves, was both nice and working as expected. It seems Samsung found that right balance of enhancing the pain vanilla OS (with things like stylus support) without getting too aggressively into the way Google designed the UX or people expecting it to work.

This is just another area where Samsung does it right. It is not by accident. But a strong, company - wide attention to both strategy and details. Again, there is a reason Apple chases Samsung so hard in courts worldwide. I have not heard they filed anything against Sony, just confirming, among other things, Samsung's Android is better.

And the final note to Sony: differentiation is not about putting together a bunch of apps, people have no idea what to do with them (like the Liveware Manager). It is about subtle enhancement of UX in the context of a particular hardware environment.