There is nothing "PC-like" about the Droid. The Droid runs Android (based on Linux, which is a completely separate operating system). If your husband had bought a phone running Windows Mobile, you might have an article.

Yes, there's lots PC-like about Android phones. They have the same pick'n'mix hardware choices to snag the unwary, the same fragmented 'standard' OS, the same wanna-be-Apple but didn't quite get it multi-touch UI (some do, some don't). They are exactly as PC is to Mac, a cheap copy that missed the point.

Android uses the same control-through-choices market approach that got Windows & VHS into pole position, with second-rate products!

McD

There's nothing more pathetic than people whose lives revolve around their computer/communication hardware!

"I'm all about my Mac." Gag!

Whatever gets the job done, for me. I've got a desktop Windows XP box that's well older than your Acer. And a Windows laptop older than that. I apply the updates regularly, keep 'em protected with antivirus and anti-malware software, and severely restrict my kids' ability to install programs, etc. No problems to report. (A hard drive died, but that's certainly not unique to Windows computers.) I've got a cell phone to make calls on. I don't think it has any "apps." Oh, how wretched am I!! I see people walking on the Greenbelt on a beautiful day... face buried in their clicky-clicky thing. They might as well be walking in a parking garage!

bikeboy, oh gag yourself :)

I agree with your concept, and know when to put the technology down/away. But when your job and livelihood revolves around the internet, the right technology is not only a convenience but a necessity. My Mac/iPhone combo saves me at least an hour a day because of the lack of hassles - time that can, and does, get spent walking the dog on the Greenbelt, cooking for my family, digging in my garden, and otherwise living actual life.

I've been an IT guy since I was a Computer Operator on an IBM System/370 mainframe that filled a big room and needed its own refrigeration unit. (Mid-70s.) Those were the days! Tape drives as big as a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer. Ten-megabyte disk drives as big as a washing machine! Jobs and Wozniak were still in the fabled Silicon Valley garage. (Of course, it wasn't Silicon Valley back then.)

Every day, all (work) day, and often into the evenings, I deal with computer and cellphone issues.

I TREASURE the time I can get up from it, and turn my back on it, for a few hours. I can't imagine enjoying cycling, or cooking or walking my dog or gardening, nearly so much, if my attention was conflicted between the activities I love and reading that email. (But I confess... I've never been much of a multitasker.)

Aw, that's because you're a GUY. Women are, seriously, more likely to multitask. Comes from balancing a baby on our hip while slicing up the mastadon, you know. :)

I've been around computers since the 70s, too. Remember Burroughs?

I learned long ago that with the exception of occasional PC-to-Mac converts like yourself, people generally prefer whatever system they learned on.

I learned on Mac and have always owned Macs, but used PCs for many, many years at work. Neither are immune to freezing and crashing. But Mac is a million times more user-friendly, well-organized and streamlined. I never fail to be amazed at how Windows can so needlessly complicate and obfuscate the simplest things.

My hubby and I are a mixed couple - black/white, mac/pc. But I've had enough (with the computer). For years I've been wondering why, again, is Bill Gates so revered? His stuff has nothing but problems. Just got a Mac. Hope I can figure it out (old dogs and all that).

P.S Jill, In the early 70s, I learned on a Wang word processor with a huge CPU thing in its own room with massive air-conditioners. Other business people came from miles around to check it out. Ha!

Heh. I enjoyed this article. Like another poster I've been in IT since the 1970's, when I was working on an IBM 370, programming on punched cards. Now I'm a DBA, working with Oracle and MySQL.

Last summer we bought our daughter (a junior at Montana State) a Macbook Pro. I liked it so much I trashed my desktop, running Ubuntu Linux, in favor of an iMac. The iMac is great. Since it runs a flavor of Unix I can bring up a terminal session and log into work via a VPN. Could I do this on Windows? Sure. But I've found the iMac to be much more stable and comfortable to use than a Windows-based PC. In my old age I really don't want to mess around with computer-based issues in my private life.

All three of us (wife, daughter, me) have iPod Touches. We love'em. I have music, apps, and Kindle books downloaded on mine. Currently have a backlog of 15 books on my Touch I need to read. I'll go fly fishing on one of the rivers in the area and when I get tired of not catching fish I'll just sit back on the river bank and read a book on my Touch.

Wife is still a Windows/Outlook person. But daughter and I are slowly turning her. She'll become a member of our Borg soon. :>)

my computerese can be written on the head of a pin. I am not a Luddite, but more of a dolt. Came to it late, and all the fast learner leaked out long ago.

It appears to me that Gates and his PC deal, his selling his language of binary code to IBM, or leasing, whatever, was aimed at sort of childish uses of the computer. Games. A quick and easy book keeping service. Nothing earth shattering, but a lot better deal than what had come before. Having to be a nerd, a computer geek to understand and delight in the travails of making one work and do what it was supposed to was part of the mystique. I am not into mystique.

Jobs and his buddies were into user friendly devices, that were more art than math, more design than stodgy storers of masses of information. And instead of selling you an operating system, he sold you his hardware and his software, and then made it available so others could make applications you might buy, and he would get a piece of. Gates and Allen made all the early money, but I do wonder if Jobs will end up with more down the road. They sell this little iPod deal, and the music industry does not go in the tank, but gets paid something for their art. The animation business grows in geometric progression, all using the Mac systems. It just seems that Jobs sells an idea inside of some hardware, and then the smart kids of the world use his platform to be entrepreneurs. He sows the seed, tends the seedling, and then a whole army of people use that plant, clone it, and add to it, and expand it, all the while Jobs is making a piece of the action, and the action is expansive.

Meanwhile, the Gates product is ever growing, but is never as good as hyped, as dependable as predicted. But is connected to a different world in a whole lot more networks than the Apple outfit. I believe my Apple laptop uses both operating systems. Or at least it says so on the dock...I can open stuff sent to me by PC folks.

So I hack around on my teeny MacBook. And my wife has the bigger version, with more bells and whistles. She uses and needs more bells and whistles. We are both computer happy. My only rodeo was when the dog wanted to jump on her lap, and she was ignoring the dog, and the dog was getting more insistent, and her distain was more evident, and finally the dog decided that he was going to make the effort, no matter what, and her megacup of coffee washed over my laptop like a tsunami, and fried it like eggs in a skillet. All I had left was a square discus. A grand later, I was back in business. And the dog still lives here. And I have my computer on a 2" high box when I use it. I raised its foundation so that another flood won't take out its brain and heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas and thyroid. Lucky me.

There's not much PC-like at all about android based phones. In fact they're far more like Mac's than PCs. You don't need to hunt down drivers, or requirements for applications. Applications can be cleanly and easily installed an uninstalled (unless they severely misbehave, but OSX is just as problem prone here, an app that doesn't follow the rules of the road well...)

Unlike a PC a single misbehaving app will NOT kill your Android based phone. You'll get a 'force close' message for that single app. Apps themselves actually each run in their own little sandbox, and unless granted rights outside that box, can't do anything outside that box. Now many apps come with default rights to get outside their box, like to get onto the network, or to save to or read from your SD card, or use the camera.

Android comes to a good OS through openness and cooperation, Apple through control. Android builds a good foundation, and gives companies and users choices, Apple controls the entire experience.

Microsoft does a lot of the same as Android does with Windows, but Windows has the huge problem of maintaining compatibility with a MASSIVE amount of old software and hardware, that OSX simply does not. Ask any Mac user whose used it since say system 7 or 8, or even better, go ask a Mac developer. Apple has thrown out all the junk with every major OS release, and practically started over. Windows has not ever done that, and thats largely to blame for it's current state of affairs. The closest Windows came to doing that was the transition from 95/98/me (WfW/3.11 based) to WinXP (Windows NT based) -- but they STILL kept backwards compatibility with the (even then) archaic Win9x OS.

Microsoft never developed any sort of coherent UI (User Interface) guidelines. Apple has had that, forever. Thats why on a Mac copy is always CMD+C (or Open Apple+C for anyone whose been around), paste is ALWAYS CMD+P, close app is CMD+Q, close window is CMD+W. In PC land, I can't even begin to tell you. I mostly know the hotkeys for the apps that I use in Windows, and how they behave, but every so often something throws me for a loop.

Mac is FAR better because from the beginning they published a set of best practices, and asked developers to follow them, and made it easy for them to.

Android has started out very much more like Mac than Windows. They started out with software package standards. UI standards. Services/backend system standards. Security standards. All like modern Mac. Windows (what many people call PCs, and what some Mac people call "Wintel") had NONE of that and has just "organically" grown them, but still left most of the "old" ways of doing things for compatibility but what that has resulted in is old code, appliations, and techniques being applied to a new OS. And the new OS not behaving quite like the old one in all respects, that introduces bugs in the old ways of doing things.

I'm not really a Windows fan. Definitely more of a Mac person myself, and I love my Android based phone. The iPhone is losing in the hardware race though. The new Android phones are all largely faster and more capable than the hardware in the iPhone. you also get a choice of carriers with Android based phones. That won't happen for a while, if ever, with the iPhone. The inherent multi-tasking nature of the underlying system in Android (which is based on a Linux kernel with a Java application environment, so you write your apps for and in Java not Linux, atleast normally) and it's open architecture, OPEN market place, and open development program with specifications and tools that are largely more accessible than iPhone means there are more developers and more software for Android phones.

The only thing that might kill Android is the idiocy of companies like Motorola who have the dumb notion that owning their own OS, building their own little walled garden, is somehow better. Moto recently bought up a handset OS company that (surprise) based it's handset OSes on Linux. So it essentially bought a very android like environment, without any of the hundreds...thousands of Android developers and apps. Or cell companies like Verizon who are why the handsets that you buy from them (including my HTC Incredible) come from thefactory as a basically locked device, but with Android thats not saying much. Even with a "locked" device that isn't rooted you can still do basically anything you want with it. You just can't replace the base OS. And this is all to blame of the Cell phone companies because they're stupid and scared of losing lock in and having to actually compete.

I think Macs are great as long as you're willing to buy into the end to end experience. But whenever you hit a snag that has you outside that, you're pretty screwed. Linux, and Android, give anyone who wants them the tools to fix their own problems.

Cell phone companies should stick to what they have figured out, which is to make hardware. Let the software companies, Apple, Microsoft (most recent Windows Mobile is actually really good...and I never thought I'd say that about and Windows product), and Google build the software for those devices. They're better at it. LOTS better. Ask anyone whose used an iPhone, Android based phone or one of the latest gen of Windows Mobile based phones. The user experience on all three is, quite frankly, great. Then talk to someone whose used an LG or Samsung or older Moto phone with a closed OS, even if it's one of the latest smart phones of that generation. They all suck by comparison.

And you notice I didn't mention Blackberry and RIM, nor WebOS? Well...WebOS I have no experience with...and I'm afraid HP might kill Palm any day now. Blackberry/RIM is a dead world, it's the Windows 9x of the mobile phone market. Developing for Blackberry is *horrifically* complicated. In fact, I'd say Blackberries, unlike Androids, are EXACTLY like PCs running Windows. Slow, confusing, inconsistent. And it's the OSes fault. For Blackberry you have to basically develop an entire interface for EACH variant of the phone. And once RIM releases a new phone they stop developing/updating the older ones.

Contrast this with Windows Mobile, iPhone, or Android. None of them require redeveloping the apps for different phones with different hardware. The iPhone is on its..I think fourth generation of hardware (which, by the way, completely tosses the idea of hardware simplicity out the window unless you're buying a new phone). Another drawback of the iPhone and well lots of the recent gen apple devices is they're building in obsolescence. By simply not letting the average user be able to change their own battery they limit the lifetime of the device to the lifetime of the battery. Great for them because they then don't have to support hardware that's more than about 5 years old, by just not making batteries available. Right now we're in the 'throw it away/new every 2' mentality of phones and such. I don't know if that will continue or not though.

My money, and my choice, lies with Android, but I think Windows Mobile is also a great choice. The iPhone, much less so, at least until it gets let out of the ATT cage, then it can compete on a much more even field. It will always have far less developers though because of the barrier to entry. Whether-or-not thats good? Well. Hard to say. If you're doing what say ten thousand other people do and need an app for that, iPhone will probably provide. If you're in a smaller pool and don't have the ability, or time, to engineer your own solution, then Windows Mobile and Android are a far better choice because the tools are much more available meaning it's more likely someone else with that problem DID have the time and ability to solve it, and hey, there's now an app for that.

I've gone REALLY far afield on this comment, heck, it's practically an article in itself....maybe I'll put it in my blog as such heh.

Mr. Loftis: I really, really appreciate your very kind explanation of the differences in how phones are configured for the market and which have potential for widespread use. Really an interesting explanation. Helpful. Thank you....

Jill I think your cartoon is a little inaccurate. The Guy on the left should also be wearing a smile - happy that he's spending his time solving all the problems 'his' choices have created for him. The guy on the right shouldn't be looking smugly at the other , he should be off actually using his car for the purposes for which he bought it.

McD