The Risk of the Google phone and Android

I could have written how excited I am about the prospect of an open access phone where carriers can’t tell me what I can do. Because I am. Or how intriguing it is that phone bills could become much cheaper because a telephone will be subsidized through ads. Because it is. But instead I’m going to voice my concern about what this could devolve into. This could devolve into my PC. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. Because my PC crashes, and applications misbehave, and I have to spend hours fixing my wife’s or my parents computers. And that’s with a reasonably modern computer and my computer science engineering degree. Why does this happen? Because I say to myself, “Self, won’t it be cool to try out that application? But maybe its drivers will conflict with my other applications? Then I’ve got to ask myself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?”

I’ll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that they have lots of smart people working on this multi-tasking OS, and that it’s still really hard to keep it running well. And the thing is, when my wife calls me and says the computer is stuck, I can just tell her to reboot it. But nobody wants to have to reboot their phone. Just like Windows MCE hasn’t taken off as a means to watch TV because no one wants to risk re-booting during the Super Bowl.

Maybe the key to this is virtualization. Keep the phone running in its own virtualized partition. And then limit the number of applications that can be loaded on the phone until the application has proven to be safe and plays nicely with other apps. But don’t allow a free for all like my PC. The risk is too great. Please make something for my mom to use that won’t require her to call me for tech support. On the other hand, she won’t be able to call me…..hmmmm…………