I am a proud owner of an iPhone 3GS. Well, in truth I was a proud owner until my two and half year old smartphone considerably slowed down when I upgraded it to iOS 5.x. The upgrade noticeably degraded the responsiveness of my mail client and web browser where each each screen tap made reading an email or searching a website so painstakingly slow that the iPhone became essentially unusable!
For more than two weeks I’ve been testing the iPhone 4S and researching my options and I’ve decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S II, an Android-powered phone. Why turn my back on Apple when the iPhone is king? Here are the 5 reasons why the Galaxy is better smartphone (in no particular order):
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The desktop search engine industry has been awfully quiet lately. Just looking at the search volume in Google Trends reveals that there’s been little positive change in the past 12 months (see chart below). But early this week, everything suddenly changed as the two search engine giants got into a fight over Google calling out Bing for copying their search results. In summary, Google baited Bing by creating illogical search results for “synthetic” queries (aka nonsense terms). Google recruited 20 engineers with Suggested Sites in Internet Explorer 8 and had them search for these fake term in Google until the results showed up in Bing (about 2 weeks!). The next day Microsoft fired back at Google explaining that the algorithm to prioritize search results uses multiple “signals” along with collective intelligence to determine search quality and in this case Google simply exposed this flaw. In essence, the flaw suggests that Microsoft considers Google to be the authoritative source whenever the result set is limited.
While there is no denying that Bing autogenerated the same results as Google, there are two important lessons that technologists and marketers should learn from this fight:
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Every other month or so I get another comment from Joe Koufman, the VP of Business Development and Marketing at Engauge, on how Android is gaining ground on Apple’s iOS. These reminders are actually friendly — Joe and I have been at it ever since I wrote late last year about whether developers should embrace the Android OS. Joe knows that I’m passionate about my iPhone as he is about his Android. And we’ve spoken on numerous occasions about how Android is available on smartphone devices by multiple mobile equipment makers where Apple’s iOS is only available through AT&T (well, at least until the upcoming rumored announcement by Verizon this December) so the deck is stacked in Google’s favor.
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