The new Blackberry Q10, Z10 and Windows Phones might, argumentatively, have as many hardware features as new Android handsets and the iPhone 5.\u00a0 Personally I would argue that some Nokia Lumia handsets running Windows Phone might be superior to many Android handsets and any iPhone ever designed.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet equal or superior hardware will not help Blackberry or Microsoft wedge their way into the hand held market dominated by Samsung and Apple today.\u00a0 There is only one real deciding factor that will push consumers to an Android or iPhone.\u00a0 Very simply: Apps.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 30, 2012 Google Play set a milestone.\u00a0 They reached the same number of apps that Apple had in iTunes on that day: over 700,000.\u00a0 As of that date Google reported just over 25 million app downloads to Apples 35 million.\u00a0 Windows Phone is making slow progress in the number of mobile apps available.\u00a0 To date Instagram, NetFlix, Pandora, and Spotify are still not available for Blackberry.\u00a0 For many people, including myself, the absence of at least one of those is a show stopper.<\/p>\n
As solid as the platform might be, as dependable as the hardware might be, if I can’t run IpBike to track my rides I will be missing an important part of why I carry a smart phone.\u00a0\u00a0 Such niche apps will be a long time coming for Windows and BB.\u00a0 Many major apps have no plan in place to develop for Blackberry, despite several development platform choices<\/a>, including Java Android Runtime.\u00a0 Why would they?\u00a0 The handsets do not have enough market saturation to warrant the expense.\u00a0 Sure, it’s a chicken\/egg thing but why spend money speculating that the new Blackberry handsets might begin to emerge in numbers they’ve not seen since 2004?\u00a0 The Windows Phone development environment is quite a bit more limited requiring knowledge of Visual Studio, Silverlight and XNA.\u00a0 Not at all suited for many developers who are used to working with mobile code supported by Android and Apple, including rapid development solutions like AppsBar and iBuildApps among others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The new Blackberry Q10, Z10 and Windows Phones might, argumentatively, have as many hardware features as new Android handsets and the iPhone 5.\u00a0 Personally I would argue that some Nokia Lumia handsets running Windows Phone might be superior to many Android handsets and any iPhone ever designed.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet equal or superior hardware will not help … Continue reading The real 800 pound gorilla in mobile competition: Apps<\/span>