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May 17, 2019
Android contemplations 2019
In this article I’ll present some of my thoughts on Android, where it’s been, and where it’s going. I’ll discuss both my personal experiences with Android as well as my observations as Editor-in-Chief of RuggedPCReview.com.
Although my primary phone has been an iPhone ever since Steve Jobs introduced the first one, and although my primary tablet is an iPad, and also has been ever since the iPad was introduced to a snickering media that mocked the tablet as just an overgrown phone without much purpose, I am inherently operating platform agnostic.
I do almost all of my production work on an iMac27 because, in my opinion, there's nothing like a Mac for stress-free work, backup, and migration. But I also use Windows desktops because Windows continues to be, by far, the dominant desktop and laptop OS. And because all laptops and many tablets in the rugged mobile computing industry that I cover use Windows. I have a Linux box because I want to stay more or less up-to-date on an OS that so much is built on, even if few know what all is using Linux in the background. I use Android because Android is, by far, the dominant OS on smartphones, and it's a major factor in tablets (and Android is built on Linux).
Over the course of my career I've seen lots of operating systems come and go. The Palm OS once ruled the mobile space. Microsoft had Windows CE in its various incarnations. There was EPOC that later became Symbian. Android actually predated the iOS, though the first commercial version didn't appear until 2008. In 2009, Motorola's Droid commercials alerted the public to Android, but few would have guessed its impending dominance. By 2010, 100,000 Android phones were activated every day, but in the rugged space Android remained largely unknown. I did a presentation on trends and concepts in mobile computing at a conference in Sweden where I alerted to the presence of Android and its future potential in rugged mobile devices.
In August 2010, I bought an Augen GenTouch78 for US$149.95 at K-Mart to educate myself in more detail about the potential of Android in tablets and presenting my findings on RuggedPCReview.com (see here). The little 7-inch Augen tablet, one of the very few Android tablets available back then, ran Android 2.1 "Eclair" and showed promise, but it didn't exactly impress. So while Android had already gained a solid foothold behind iOS and Symbian in smartphones, its future in tablets still seemed uncertain.
Android's fortunes in rugged tablets appeared to change in 2011 when, to great fanfare, Panasonic introduced the Toughpad A1 at Dallas Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Getac followed in 2012 with the Z710, and Xplore in 2013 with the RangerX. None of these lived up to sales expectations. In light of the massive success of Android in smartphones, the problems Android had in establishing itself in tablets seemed hard to understand. In hindsight, it may have been a combination of Google's almost 100% concentration on phones and Microsoft's rediscovery of touch and tablets with the introduction of Windows 8 and, from 2012 on, the Microsoft Surface tablets.
In the ruggedized handheld space, driven by the success of Android-based smartphones, the situation began to change. After having been beaten to the punch by smaller, nimbler companies such as the Handheld Group, Unitech and Winmate, both Motorola Solutions and Honeywell began placing emphasis on Android. Both announced their commitment to Android late 2013, albeit initially by simply making available some of their devices either with Windows Mobile or with Android. For the next several years, offering both Windows Embedded Handheld (the renamed Windows Mobile) versions of handhelds became the norm. It was a (not very cost-effective) case of hedging bets and offending no one.
By 2016 it became obvious that Microsoft had either lost the mobile war or had simply lost interest in it. The situation had been quite untenable for several years where Microsoft had essentially abandoned Windows Embedded Handheld and concentrated on Windows Phone instead. Windows Phone, later strangely renamed to Windows Mobile, didn't go anywhere either, and so Microsoft called it quits.
It was time for me to get another personal Android device to see how the platform had developed on the tablet side. My choice was the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series, a gorgeous 8.4-inch tablet running Android 5.1. Beginning with its super-sleek design, its wonderful 2,560 x 1,600 pixel OLED display, its four (!) cameras, and its excellent battery life, the Dell tablet was simply terrific (see my coverage in RuggedPCReview.com). And Android certainly had come a very long way. Dell, however, didn't stay long in the Android tablet space. The fact that I was able to get it at half of its original price should have been an indication.
Around that time I also began writing Android user manuals for some clients. This made me realize one major weakness of Android. Its user interface, while suitable for simple phone tasks, is hopelessly convoluted and everything changes with every new rev. Features, functions, screens and menus are forever haphazardly rearranged and renamed, making Android needlessly frustrating and complex to use. Adult supervision is needed to rein in that endless fiddling around with the Android UI. And with every new rev, Google's presence becomes more heavy-handed in Android. "Neutral" apps are being replaced with Google apps, and there is ever more pressure to use Google accounts and Google services. Google was, and is, taking over.
When my Dell tablet gave up the ghost a few months ago, I began looking for another personal Android device. This time, for a variety of reasons, I wanted a phone and not a tablet. This would give me a chance to get a very recent version of Android, and also the opportunity to see where your average consumer smartphone stands compared to rugged Android devices. While I was at it, I felt this was also a good time to get to know one of the rapidly growing Chinese smartphone giants, namely Huawei (Wowie? Wha-Way? Whaa-wee? Huu-Ahh-Way?).
So in May 2019 (just a few days before Google's sudden termination of its relationship with Huawei) I purchased a Huawei P30 Lite smartphone, a lower-cost version of the company's P30 Pro. Just like the iPhone, Huawei's latest phones all look almost identical, but there are fairly substantial differences as well. Screen sizes vary, as do cameras, materials, batteries and technologies. My (unlocked) P30 Lite cost just $300. It's between the iPhone XS and XS Max in size, but is both lighter and a bit thinner than even the smaller iPhone XS.
The P30 Lite runs Android 9.0.1, close to bleeding-edge. The 6.15-inch IPS LCD display is bright enough (450 nits as measured) and its 1080 x 2312 pixel resolution translates into a stellar 415ppi. The phone comes with 4GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage, and a micro SDXC slot that can handle up to 1TB cards.
There are four cameras: a 24MP f/2.0 selfie camera, a 24MP f/1.8 main camera (and EU versions even a 48MP camera!), an 8MP ultrawide camera, and a 2MP "depth sensor" camera for adding bokeh effects. Despite the very high resolution, video is limited to 1080p/30fps, probably so as not to compete with the higher-end models. There are two nano-SIM slots, but one shares space with the micro-SD card, so you can't have both.
There's a reversible USB Type-C port, a separate standard 3.5mm audio jack, a non-removable 3,340mAH Li-Polymer battery, 802.11ac WiFi, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.2. The whole thing is powered by an octa-core Hisilicon Kirin 710 chipset (4 x 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 and 4 x 1.7GHz Cortex-A53) made by Huawei itself and running up to 2.2GHz. The body looks quite high-rent, though it's plastic and not metal like the higher level Huawei P30 phones.
There are no references to ruggedness at all, and the P30 Lite comes with a transparent protective boot and also a screen protector. So presumably no splashing in the water or rough handling. The phone supports face recognition and also has a fingerprint scanner in the back. That may sound an odd placement, but it works great.
Since this is pretty much a bargain brand-name phone and doesn't have the same high-powered chipset as the top-of-the-line models, how well does it perform? Very well, actually. In the AnTuTu and PassMark Mobile benchmarks it scored a good 50% faster than any of the recent rugged Android handhelds and tablets we tested. Just another example of how consumer tech remains vexingly ahead of anything longer-lifecycle/lower sales volume rugged devices can do.
So the issue remains. Consumer tech is fast, advanced, light, glossy and, unless you go ultra-premium, cheap. There's a protective case for anything and everything. If a company buys a thousand devices like this Huawei P30 Lite, it'll cost $300,000. If it goes for dedicated rugged devices, it may cost a million. Or not (the rather rugged and well-sealed Kyocera DuraForce PRO 2 we recently tested ran just $400). Then it comes down to issues like service, warranties, ease of replacement, and so on. Personally, I very much believe in spending money for high-quality tools made for the job, but it's easy to see the lure of consumer tech.
So where will things go from here? Android will almost certainly maintain its dominance in smartphones. Unless Microsoft pulls an unexpected rabbit out of its corporate hat, pretty much all enterprise and industrial handhelds will be Android for the foreseeable future. I fear that Google’s increasingly heavy presence all through Android will become a more pressing problem. As will the lack of a clean, compelling “professional†version of Android (the current Android AOSP, Android for Work, etc., are insufficient).
With tablets it’s more difficult to tell Android’s future trajectory, mostly because of definitions of what counts as a tablet. I’d guess 1/3 iOS, 1/3 Android, and 1/3 Windows, but many statistics suggest otherwise. statista.com, for example, sees it as 58% iOS, 26% Android, and 16% Windows for worldwide tablet OS share in 2018. Android’s future in tablets may also depend on who will come out on top in Google’s current internal squabble between Android and the Chrome OS.
Version fragmentation remains a serious weakness in Android. And since a lot of devices cannot be updated and version support ends quickly (Version 6, Marshmallow, is already no longer supported by Google), the roughly annual new major version release obsoletes Android hardware very quickly. That’s no problem for consumer tech. But is definitely an issue for vertical and industrial markets where manufacturers need to decide what to build and support, and customers in what and whom to place their trust.
Posted by conradb212 at May 17, 2019 6:29 PM