paulplatt

The main trends I keep coming back to are convergence and transparency. Google is holding Google I/O 2011 and these trends are front and center. There is a lot to cover. To start, let’s talk about Ice Cream Sandwich. No, not the dessert but the update to Android. As I mentioned after looking at the Xoom, a problem with Android tablets is that they are more than a little divorced from the Android phone experience. Ice Cream Sandwich solves that by bringing a lot of the tablet features to the phone. This gets Google back on track and makes them a serious threat to Apple. Goole seems to finally recognize that, while variety may be the spice of life, variety, in the form of platform fragmentation, is also the enemy of convergence and transparency. Fragmentation of the Android platform is a big problem but Ice Cream Sandwich is a big step toward reducing fragmentation. That means a common user experience between an Android phone and an Android tablet. This is a hallmark of Apple’s iOS. Absent from all of this is Microsoft.