Pretty tied up with stuff lately, so not much external writing happening. Today's post is just a simple observation:
This is an extremely cool looking toy. I can see lots of different possibilities around technology and software like this in healthcare. But then look at the firing mechanism. A mechanical, capacative trigger. Yuck. Can't even have a simple trigger integrated with the device.
The cool thing about Android is that you can take it out of it's tablet skin and use it in a variety of different places, "dumb down" the installed software to support a single purpose, and voilà, you can have controls for a car, coffee maker, dishwasher or any moderately complex device, including many used in Healthcare. Want to integrate wired networking instead of wireless? other inputs? Yep, can do. Imagine trying to get the same sort of iP* components for use in other manufacturing. I'm not sure that's ever going to happen.
Everywhere there's an LCD screen and three or four buttons to control a device, you could replace it with a slimmed down user control supporting something running on the Android platform. There's a lot more of those out there than there are phones and tablets.
Just sayin'
I don't know if this is a completely fair assessment of the potential for iOS devices. There are lots of unique ways to use the hardware with external devices and more.
ReplyDeleteAndroid is only pseudo opensource and as long as what you want it to do is supported by the direction decided by Google you're fine. There is still a great amount of control exerted by Google that the general programmer public has no control of.
Plus not to mention that the audience for said devices is probably different. I don't think Apple is too concerned with proliferating their operating system across a bunch of half baked devices. They feel it's more beneficial to control the user experience more closely and thus provide consistency. Two different models of operating and I think they will coexist for a long time to come.
Android has a long way to come if they want to produce software as impressive as iOS especially in the tablet market. Those Android tablets consists of like 15% of the market at best.
Don't consider me a Google hater, I'm posting this using my Google credentials!