Amidst the process of making their revolutionary open source phone OS, a direct competitor to the iPhone, Google has forgotten one important thing—the desktop part of it!
Let’s back up to the iPhone and see what role iTunes plays in it. To put it in a single word, everything! First of all, it manages your music, movies, and TV shows and synchronises them with your iPhone in a manner unmatched by any other application from any other phone manufacturer. Secondly, it manages your applications, makes sure your contacts are sent to and fro, and manages the rest of your iPhone settings with the the trademark Apple touch firmly in place.
Let’s draw a real world example here. I have a bunch of Podcasts set to automatically download new episodes when available. Whenever I dock my iPhone, it automatically syncs any unplayed episodes to my phone. If I watch/listen to the podcast on my desktop or my iPhone, the next time I dock my iPhone it will delete it and transfer a new one instead. If I watch it halfway on my iPhone, it will transfer that info on the next sync, and resume playback at the exact same position. This is just one example of the big role iTunes plays in the working of the iPhone.
Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical about Google’s being able to pull this off in the first place. I expected something poor and shabby, with a shabby interface to begin with. Something even half as good as iTunes would have been sufficient to impress the likes of me. But Google had to prove me wrong. Instead of making a shabby application, they have totally done away with it.
To sum up the the Android platform, what we have is the phone (HTC G1) and the Android OS, but no software to back it up. You have to manage your contacts and emails using a Google account (Tell me, have you checked the mess in your Google contacts recently?) It is inevitable that this will result in a multitude of vendor specific software, which will confuse the hell out of the end user. Think about it: you not only have to choose among a variety of different shapes, sizes, and features from the phone perspective, you also have to ensure that the software backing it all up is up to the mark (if at all there is any in the first place). This, of course, is just one of the gazillion problems I can think of with regard to this platform, but I will refrain from venting them all out in one article (be thankful, be very thankful).
The Android platform may be in its early stages right now (the phone isn’t even available for the general public) and Google may be planning on something for later, but if this is the way things are supposed to be, it will turn out to be just like Linux was to the desktop (very powerful software but one most people, the “average” folk, choose to stay away from). And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?
