Google has been taking a swipe at fellow mobile operating system purveyors Apple. According to IT Week, at a conference last week, Google’s mobile platforms manager Rich Miner said:
“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. There’s a single manufacturer, it’s targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide.”
Miner probably has a point here: the Android platform is going to be available to any number of device manufacturers making both high and low end devices. As a result, there’s definitely a far larger potential market for Android. But, that said, Apple’s iPhone was never a mass-market play – it was always going to be aimed at those with a bit of cash to spend – so the two aren’t necessarily rivals to start with.
As a footnote, it’s not all trash-talking: Miner also said if he were a developer, he’d be working on both platforms.
I still wonder if Jobs didn’t privately want the perception of his iPhone to be seen more as an elitist gadget…one that costs more and one that not everyone has or can afford, thus not having to compete head to head with future phones that the likes of Google might put out.
Though certainly not carrying the price tag of the Vertu devices, this may be a similar play by Apple.