TechDomino
Google has recently announced at I/O 2013 that there have been 900 million Android activations in total so far. But Gartner predicts that next year alone there will be 1 billion Android devices shipped on the market.
These won’t be just smartphones, though. Android will finally begin to embrace its destiny of being an OS that works not just on phones, and tablets, but also on all sorts of other devices, such as TV’s, wearables, and even Android PC’s.
HP, one of the largest PC makers has already started aggressively pushing Android on notebooks and PC’s, and that’s just the beginning. Next year they should start pushing Android to enterprise more seriously, too, and into more sales channels, where they are now pushing Windows PC’s.
I believe others like Asus, Acer, Samsung and Lenovo will also quickly follow them, especially if Google is serious about it, and releases Android 5.0 with a lot of improvements that make it much more usable on a PC. Android is fine on a phone, but I think it could look a lot better than it does on 10″ tablets or on even larger screens.
But besides how it looks on these large screens, Android also needs to become more advanced as an operating system, in order to be treated seriously as a “Windows alternative”. For example, it could use a more advanced multi-tasking system, that makes it act more “PC-like”, when switching between applications. It also needs to allow screen splitting, so you can use 2 apps at once. Windows allows it, and Ubuntu Touch will allow it, too.
What’s interesting is that Android will be outselling Windows on the whole, by a lot. Sure, most of those are actually smartphones, but it does present a very serious threat in the long term to the Windows dominance in the PC market, too. Also it doesn’t look like those “hybrids” will be making much of an impact anytime soon. Only 20 million of them will be sold this year, and 40 million next year.
That’s much less than the over 200 million tablets being sold this year, and close to 300 million next year. If Google gets it right with Android 5.0, that Android PC trend might actually accelerate.
[Source: Gartner]
