Android Phones Take A Power Trip

From: The NY Times

You know the old techie joke, right? If you don’t like the Android phones on the market, just wait a minute.
There are dozens of Android phones, and newer, better ones appear every few months. Google subscribes to the Microsoft Windows scheme: write the software, and let other companies build the phones.
The result is a lot of choice, but also a lot of fragmentation. There is no one Android phone. Some models can be updated to new Android software, some can’t. A certain app might or might not run on your particular version.
That master plan differs quite a bit from the iPhone’s.
Apple designs “the whole widget,” as Steve Jobs used to say: both the software and the phone. The result is clean, reliable and consistent — but you’re limited to the features Apple wants to give you. For example, if you want a 4G phone (one that runs on the new, very fast Internet networks in big cities), you’re out of luck.
And a new iPhone, accompanied by a major software release, comes out only once a year, or less often. In any case, there’s a lot of news in Androidland. The three biggest players are Samsung, Motorola and HTC, and all three are offering beautiful marquee Android phones. All three are Verizon 4G phones.

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