Past the peak of smartphones.

The motorola droid 3 is probably the best machine we will see for a while.

I think the phone was only available for 6 months or something like that, and that’s probably when motorola and/or google figured out their mistake.

For a while there was a race to the top, the most stuff in the most phone for the most money. Reasonable business plan. You cram a lot of features into a device and then charge a lot of money for it. This pays for the R&D for the next round.

Except somewhere along the way, somebody figured out that giving the end user lots of cool hardware was probably not in their best long term interest. Apple makes the example obvious. No apple device (phone, tablet) has ever had an SD card slot. Why? Well, why would you ever need to take any content off your phone? Especially without Apple’s ok. If you want more storage, then buy a gizmo with more memory, but allowing you to add removable storage is just bad news for the ecosystem.

I think motorola or google eventually joined that bandwagon, because I notice that the newer the device, the less crazy over the top hardware it has.

The newer devices don’t seem to have HDMI ports on them. Or SD card slots.

I noticed that the droid 4 comes with 8 gig of internal storage whereas the droid 3 came with 16 gig.

So I figure the droid 3 was near the pinnacle of the best hardware that anybody’s ever going to make for the mass market.

And since they can be had on ebay for $30 now, it seems like an incredibly good deal, until they make interfacing with them impossible.

What I mean by that is that I have a samsung captivate glide, it’s only 2 years old, but since it runs android 2.3.something I can no longer download the latest google calendar app, so I can no longer sync the calendar on my phone with my google calendar.

I figure we’ll be seeing more and more of google moving towards their walled garden ecosystem like the one apple as created for themselves.

After all, that’s where the money is.

 

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