Earlier this week, the T-Mobile G1 with Google was officially introduced to the world in New York City. Now, the hardware itself isn’t all that exciting — you can read more about it here — but the bigger news is that the T-Mobile G1 is the first smartphone on the market to be powered by the new Google Android operating system.
Android is an open platform and it is meant to compete against Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and the Apple iPhone platforms in the sense that it is an operating system for a smartphone. Being an open platform, it works in a similar way as Linux, allowing developers to add, adjust, and alter it to suit their needs. It has some integrated multimedia functionality and can be construed either as a business or a consumer-minded platform.
When the iPhone first hit the market, people weren’t sure how the public would react. Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that Apple found resounding success with its first cell phone. With the introduction of the T-Mobile G1 — which is actually the result of a three-way partnership between Google, T-Mobile, and HTC — we’ve got to wonder how they go about marketing it so that it can enjoy a similar kind of success.
The biggest selling point, it seems, is the fact that Google Android is completely open and the Android Market won’t be as restrictive as the iPhone App Store. How would you go about marketing this phone? How would you be able to persuade iPhone fans to consider this alternative instead?
Buy Used Mobile
September 28, 2008 4:52 am
I could not understand why you have used marketing 101 as the topic of this post??
Armen Shirvanian
October 12, 2008 7:37 pm
It would be difficult to pull iPhone users/fans away from their product of choice, but one way to do so would be by connecting Android to thoughts of open-source qualities. This would cause individuals to think of it as the future of phone code like Wikipedia and Firefox, and as creations that continue on and are able to be seen inside and out.