Wozniak on Android

You can say a lot about Wozniak and his IT life. And yet according to The Daily Beast, he is not a close-minded person.

Steve Wozniak

Job’s View

Not long ago, Google management was on the Board of Directors for Apple, Inc. That changed when Google brought out the Android OS. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs complained bitterly that Apple was not in the search business and felt strongly that Google should not be in the smart phone OS business.  Jobs revealed in his memoirs that he would spend all the money Apple had in the bank and pursue relentlessly the destruction of the Android OS.

The Woz’s View

While the Woz still uses his iPhone as his primary phone, his eyes are opened enough to see where the Android OS has some advantages. The Daily Beast quotes Mr. with:Wozniak

“My primary phone is the iPhone, I love the beauty of it.
But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do.”

He feels the voice commands are superior on the Android offering. For example, he really likes Android’s built-in navigation system with the smart phone behaving like a GPS system.

He seems pretty open-minded when he points out that Android phones are not as easy to use as iPhone is, but he acknowledges that the divide is not that great, saying:

“if you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little better,
well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways.”

Some of the Apple faithful were a bit surprised when he showed up on the Google campus to pick up an early version of the Galaxy Nexus smart phone. They shouldn’t be surprised. The head of the Android project for Google is Andy Rubin. Rubin once owned a company known as Danger, creating a smart phone known as the Sidekick. Mr. Wozniak was on the Board of Directors for that company.

Mac Vs. Windows

Wozniak should be feeling a little déjà vu, all over again. It is consistent with history when one looks at the battle between the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows. To this day, Apple still tightly controls every aspect of the hardware and software. Certainly that gives them certain advantages in everything from power consumption to performance. Hardware and software engineers can sit down at a table and go eyeball-to-eyeball. This lets them remove from the designs any extraneous line of code, every unneeded circuit.

Yet it was Microsoft who dominated the scene with approximately 90% market share of all the operating systems on planet Earth. It cannot be dismissed out of hand that by Microsoft licensing virtually anyone who wanted its intellectual property, they gave manufacturers something they sorely needed and they could not get from Apple.

This time around Mr. Wozniak is concerned that Android is a stronger competitor. The Daily Beast reported him saying:

“there’s not as big a difference as there was between Mac and Windows.”

Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface)

Perhaps the biggest blow is surrounding Siri, Apple’s voice recognition software. The icon says he used Siri for a long time and loved it as an independent app on the iPhone. His complaints about Siri on the iPhone4S are that Siri is too much focused on getting listings for prime rib instead of prime numbers. And perhaps worse, Siri can’t make connection to the servers that power the system differently. He said:

“with the iPhone for I could press a button and call my wife. Now on the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it cannot connect. I’ve never had an android come back and say, I can’t connect over the Internet.'”

Overall, Woz says he would still recommend the iPhone, but views Android as a serious competitor.

Tcat HouserTcat Houser is a well-known computer book author with over thirty-six 600+ page tech manuals to his name, which he now considers to be “door stops”. Known prior to 2000 as Tim Catura-Houser, since 2000 as Tcat Houser. You can see 5 of his old works on line for free at http://certiguide.com/ (no longer available) 

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Comments

    • Brenda
    • March 31, 2012
    Reply

    My son just changed from an Android phone to an iPhone4s and the reception is not good. It cuts out all the time. The Android was great.

    • Breanne
    • March 31, 2012
    Reply

    I got an Android Tmobile LG Doubleplay recently. In the reviews some said the screen wasn’t very responsive and some said it was. I think I got one that isn’t. I wonder if they will let me exchange it. Or maybe I just need more time to learn to work it. And I can’t figure out how to get the little screen to work. I know thats not the fault of the phone, but can anyone explain?

    • Levon
    • January 11, 2013
    Reply

    I think Woz’s comments are the reason why Apple is putting so much effort and marketing into Suri and trying to get it to a selling point

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