We have some interesting news to bring you in relation to the ongoing software rivalry between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just revealed that he sees Apple’s new Siri software as a competitive threat to Google’s business model.
If you ask any iPhone 4S owner for their thoughts on Siri, the majority will tell you that it is one of the most impressive things seen on a smartphone and another stroke of Apple’s magic where they take an existing technology and put their innovative spin on it.
On the other hand, most Android users will dismiss Siri at the first opportunity, by saying that Android already had it in the first place, and that it basically does the same funtions as Siri.
Recent comments made by Schmidt though may be deemed as a complete backtrack to previous comments made by the CEO in which he dismissed Apple as a competitive threat. Here is what he said at a recent U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee, as reported from Apple Insider:
”Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S. Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search. Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information.”
There’s a lot of information to digest there, but the clearest indication there is that Google do see Apple as a threat, and Siri is a big factor because of this. Ice Cream Sandwich will include some more voice to text features upon release, such as being able to send an SMS message to users just by voice only – similar to the way in which Siri works.
However, two innovative features that will be unique to Ice Cream Sandwich, are the Face Unlock and Android Beam features. Face Unlock will unlock your Android 4.0 handset by using face recognition only, while Android Beam will allow users to exchange data almost instantly between two Android 4.0 handsets using NFC technology. The upcoming Galaxy Nexus will be the first handset to showcase both when it launches later on this month.
What are your thoughts on the comments from Google’s CEO? If you are an Android fan, do you admit that Siri is very impressive, or do you believe that Ice Cream Sandwich will offer the same functionality in future software updates?
Source is
http://www.product-reviews.net/2011/11/07/ios-5-vs-ice-cream-sandwich-4-0-google-is-worried-about-siri/
No comments:
Post a Comment