Jeremy Durham

After reading Gruber’s article about Android and the iPhone, and having been long overdue to write my iPhone/Android article, today is the day.

Before we begin, I want you to understand very well where I stand on the Android/iPhone debate. Android will continue to gain market share, at the expense of Apple and RIM, and will easily be the market leader in the next year or two. There will be no debate. I firmly believe this.

I am heavily invested in both Apple and Google. I ran Windows until around 2000, ran Linux at home until ~2004, and have been exclusively Mac since sometime in 2004. Both my children have iPods, my wife and I both have iPhones and Macbook Pros, and I work on a iMac all day at work. I love the philosophy of Apple, and to be completely honest, I love their products. Short of me spending months to build something perfectly tailored to my flavor of the week, it’s the closest thing to perfection, for me. On the Google side, I use Gmail, Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Groups, Google Maps, and probably other Google products daily. I have over 6 and a half years of personal e-mail on Gmail, have read over 220,000 items via Google Reader, use Google Analytics to track a number of personal and professional sites, Google Groups to manage my open source projects and football league, and use Google Maps countless times to make sure I get where I need to, when I need to.

With the release of the Nexus S, something really hit me. I watched the Nexus S commercial, and came away fairly unimpressed with the device. It reminded me a lot of the Samsung Galaxy S, actually. What did impress me, of course, was the apps. Not the 3rd party apps, but the Google apps. Google Voice, Google Maps, Google Navigator.

My concern as both platforms mature is that Google will continue to build and improve tools only for their platform as a “Product Differentiator”, and as a consumer on another platform (iPhone), Google Maps, Google Navigator, Google Reader, and Gmail are all good examples of this in varying ways.

If Google built a device like the iPhone: a non-plastic, non-cheap feeling device that didn’t require extensive configuration or tweaking to get it to a state where I’d want to use it, they might be a better candidate for my smart phone business. Maybe then my concerns will be quelled. On the other hand, Google is more a get it out there and iterate it kind of company, which typically means substandard initial releases of products. I don’t want to be your guinea pig when it comes to a $200 phone that will cost over $2000 over the life of the phone.

Are you addicted to Apple and Google? Do you read Google Reader via a Safari window on your iPhone? Do you use Mapquest4Mobile because Google refuses to release Google Navigator for iPhone? Do you use Google Priority Inbox watered down on your iPhone? How do others cope?