The Philippine Online Chronicles

For the past three years, mobile phones running on the Android operating system have become increasingly popular. Last March, Android’s domination in the United States was evident, with an incredible 50% market share, effectively double that of its nearest competitor, Apple’s iOS. More conservative estimates peg it at one-third, still a sizable chunk of the smartphone market.

Here in the Philippines, Android is also catching up. Both Globe and Smart are offering Android-capable handsets. In a country where anything with iOS is seen as cutting-edge, convenient, sosyal tech despite its crippling lack of functionality, it’s reassuring to see Android entering the limelight. This year’s WWDC had Apple touting “innovations” for future versions of iOS that had been present in core Android for years, such as tabbed browsing, contact syncing, better integration, and more.

I suppose one of the core reasons why Android is ahead, at least in sales, is its sheer ubiquity. Whereas iOS is only present in a handful of handsets, all of them beginning in “iP” and are made by Apple themselves, Android has partnerships with several hardware manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and other mobile giants. (It should be noted that a similar trend also occurs in the PC market, with Apple’s OS only running well on dedicated hardware and Windows and Linux—on which Android is based—run on anything that support them.) Many of these companies have been on the mobile scene for years, and people like brands they can trust. The same can be said for Apple, of course, and the fact that Apple maintains a healthy market share despite only having one central piece of hardware is a huge testament to that.

With this ubiquity comes another critical ace in the Android sleeve—pricing. In the Philippines, the iPhone 4 is only officially available through one operator: Globe. When the iPhone 4 was first launched last year, its price was somewhere in the neighborhood of at least PhP 40,000, in part due to the markups we have for electronics in general. Now, if you know where to look, it’s a good fifteen thousand less than that, going for PhP 25,000 or even less. When similar-specced Android phones came out at around the same time—I’m taking the HTC Desire as an example—they were less than PhP 30,000.

While our overpriced electronics certainly affected the iPhone 4’s Philippine pricing, it doesn’t explain why phones with similar (and even superior) features were priced over 30 percent less than their Apple counterpart. This is due to the Apple branding, something that Apple has cultivated over the years, selling a similar-specced (and often inferior) product for thousands of pesos more—this sort of thing happens in the desktop and laptop market as well. The status that Apple products afford is all well and good (some would argue they’re worth the price) but for people that want functionality, Android is the way to go.

Since Android is owned by Google, one of the most useful features of having an Android handset is having your phone integrate with your Google account. Once you make the link between your phone and Google account (all through the convenience of your phone’s wireless capabilities) you can back up your phone’s text messages, contacts, and even appointments and call logs to the cloud. While away from your handset, you can then access that same data through your Google account, be it on a PC, a tablet or even another phone. Best of all, this feature can be toggled to be persistent as long as you’re connected to the internet (either on a wi-fi or mobile network, though the latter will most assuredly drain your battery) so losing your phone isn’t the technical nightmare it used to be, at least on the data end.

Furthering the Google functionality is the integration of Google Docs, allowing access to your documents saved on your Google account, editing and viewing them all on your mobile. Again, this is something that Steve Jobs deemed groundbreaking at Apple’s most recent WWDC, but here is Android, being able to do it for years. And even though Facebook and Google seem to be enemies, Facebook integrates seamlessly with Android handsets, syncing profile images, email addresses and phone numbers out of the box.

Accessibility and intuitiveness are core tenets in Android’s user interface, and this manifests itself most in the Home Screen, which is akin to a PC power user’s desktop—you can see the weather, your most-used applications, shortcuts to control commands like wireless settings, anything you’d like, really—it’s fully customizable. Depending on the hardware manufacturer, this interface can be enhanced even further; HTC Sense in particular turns the functionality up to 11.

Of course, all of this is on top of the standard smartphone stuff: media playback, GPS, cameras, radio, optimization for touch input, and access to a variety of programs on the Android Market. And, depending on what aspect you’re looking at, the Android Market is both the best and worst part of Android.

Much like Apple’s App Store, the Android Market allows smaller developers to create programs that are easily accessible by a wide variety of users. And while the standards for putting apps on the Android Market are much looser, letting even smaller devs put up their work, this is a double-edged sword. There are many apps in the App Store that don’t have equivalents on the Android Market, and if you’re looking for games, then Android has significantly fewer ones than Apple, though many developers are beginning to port over their previous titles and making multiplatform releases. (Though you probably shouldn’t be getting an Android or an iDevice to game anyway.) But hey, at least Android gets Angry Birds for free.

In fact, many of Android’s best features are double-edged swords, the most frightening of which is the fact that it’s powered by Google. Google has integrated itself in our lives so seamlessly over the past decade that we forget how deep it has penetrated, raising concerns about privacy. Google uses the location functionality of Android handsets to push location-based ads, and recently it was revealed that hackers can access one’s personal data through the very protocol that Android uses to integrate with Google Accounts. This has been resolved, but there is always that possibility, if you are that concerned.

How well you weigh these drawbacks over the benefits of using an Android handset all depends on where you stand on these issues—having an open OS will have inevitable security weaknesses, but whether or not that’s preferable to a fully proprietary one like iOS is something to think about. Most of Android’s flaws can be averted by prudent internet use, which is something everyone should commit to anyway. For ease of use and price, as well as a wide range of customizable features on top of impressive out-of-the-box functionality, Android is highly recommended. Oh, and did I mention it has Flash support?