Suggest a Phone and whether its right time to buy one

[Sushubh]

nope. android can be easily avoided. ios and wp are solid alternatives. why? because both of them have solid ecosystems associated with them.

Apple, microsoft and google are the three biggest consumer service providers in the market. no matter how hard you try, you are going to be associated with one of these three platforms.

and none of them are likely to support any of these new players in the market resulting in a major vacuum when it comes to apps and services.

i am basing my statement on the reality of what happened with ios 6 and iPhone 5 were launched. people suffered with apple maps. people delayed installation till google maps arrived.

if apple buys waze, it removes one of the most powerful (and free) third party mapping and navigation platform available to mobile users today.

we have had a couple of bada device owners on the forum. i know a few online. all of them have the same complaints. twitter did not launch an official app for bada. whatsapp did not have an app for bada. and so on.

i am just waiting to see the disaster blackberry 10 is going to be in the coming months. of course, all of this is my opinion. and i wish all the best to folks who get a device outside the big three i mentioned in this post.

and as for java and oracle. i am not sure if you read the news. oracle lost the lawsuit. google won. the threat from oracle is history. 80% of android manufacturers have signed a deal with microsoft over their patents. so threat from microsoft is gone too.

and of course... most of these new mobile operating systems... if any of them become relevant in the coming years, they are going to face the same legal threats from the likes of apple and microsoft and Nokia. it's not like they are going to be able to come up with a mobile platform that does not infringe on any of the patents owned by a rival company.

no one bothers to target these companies today because they are not relevant enough. i wonder if you read the news about research in motion paying royalty to nokia for patents?

 

[mhsabir]

BB has a dedicated fan base. Worst case they might get stuck and stay at that level. I dont see them shutting shop like HP/Palm did. They have a huge cash reserve. And if rumours are to be believed they might launch with around 100K apps. Ofcourse, a few popular missing apps could turn the tide negatively, but one thing I feel is BB doesnt want to do a Playbook & launch a half-baked device. They are trying very best to get a finished product with all or atleast most popular apps in place. And they have backup plans of splitting the BES, licensing their OS etc. And I feel, they might end up remaining stagnant, but they are not going to be finished for atleast for 3-4 years.

 

[Sushubh]

they have a better shot at survival than windows phone. but then it remains to be seen who else would target bb10 with patent lawsuits once it is launched on devices. they are already paying royalty to Nokia. i am not so sure about Apple. but they are not going to be amused if it becomes a threat for them in the corporate sector and so on. also remains to be seen if they can sustain with an apple like model with complete control over their ecosystem (manufacturing, developing, selling, marketing, supporting etc etc.).

 

[DNA_Uncut]

Bada's not an open source. Tizen n sailfish are that's where the different lies. And btw, oracle vs google battle is not yet ovr. oracle already announced that they are going to appeal against the verdict. And only 1/3rd of the microsoft vs google patents issues are settled.

 

[mhsabir]

Thats why they have clearly mentioned that though its not their Plan A, they could eventually license the OS. Someone like HTC might be interested. Also one of the reason why Apple has many Apps, is because developers see more money making opportunities than on Android. BB offers them that option to make money as well. It might fail at the end, but they are trying to get Android Apps ported. People have shown how easy its to port an iOS App (not using BB tools, but through minor code changes & steps). Some people were able to get Playstation emulator on it & play those games as well. They saw that they made blunders with Playbook. They changed their strategy, they tried to seed in Playbook tablets as much as possible. They gave BB10 Alpha A, B devices to developers to get them interested. They are willing to give some goodies to developers to develop for their platform. The end result might still be a failure, but I have been following their news for a year now, and I would certainly not blame them for trying & I think they are trying decently hard enough.

 

[mhsabir]

At the end of the day, the ease of use, brand, no. of apps all need to come together for it to be a success & its too early to judge Jolla, Sailfish, Tizen, Ubuntu OS etc, even BB10. But we are talking about getting interested enough of getting that phone & finding it good enough to recommend to others.

 

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[Sushubh]

Bada's not an open source. Tizen n sailfish are that's where the different lies. And btw, oracle vs google battle is not yet ovr. oracle already announced that they are going to appeal against the verdict. And only 1/3rd of the microsoft vs google patents issues are settled.

samsung is expected to merge bada with tizen project sometime this year. rumors about them developing a tizen device means only one thing that they are done with bada. it makes no financial sense for them to support four different mobile platforms (wp, bada, android and tizen).

from what i understood, court's ruling was pretty definitive that google did not infringe on oracle's patent by using similar APIs in android. oracle can spend whatsoever resources on an appeal, but a precedent has been established. it was not a fluke result like the one in the lawsuit between samsung and Apple. it was a very well contested lawsuit and the result was supported by industry experts.

and search on google. all the major android makers other than motorola (google) have signed deals with microsoft. only the smaller players in the market are left (local companies like lava or micromax). microsoft might or might not go after them. but samsung and htc and LG have signed deals which covers basically the majority of android devices sold in the market.

yes, samsung could sometime in the future ditch android. but that would still give google enough time to get motorola back on its feet. smaller players like lg and Sony are fully committed to android platform right now and are likely to stick with it for a long time to come. at least unless windows phone becomes a large enough alternative for them to consider.

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on the blackberry front. i would like to know what mapping platform they are going to offer on bb10. have they revealed anything? basic mapping is of course doable through openstreetmap or a partnership with tomtom like player. would really love to know about what they are doing with gps navigation on bb10.

 

[mhsabir]

And even then how many of the "geeks" would be confident enough to step away from the top two iOS, Android or even four -including WP8 & BB10 & experiment by buying such phones.I think BB10 licensed TomTom. Google Maps is available unofficially as a sideloaded App on Playbook, not sure what will be the status on that one.