IMHO, Microsoft forcing all those “mandates” on phone manufacturers is counterproductive. Besides the fact that if feels like the Federal Government, it is not necessary and will drive certain consumers away. If consumers demand certain features and specs, the manufacturers will provide them.
I think one of best features of Android is that there are so many different phones, with different manufacturers, specs and configurations to choose from. The lack of this is the biggest drawback of Apple ios.
Some people don’t want to pay for a higher resolution screen, a flash, a 1 ghz processor, etc. Also, some of those features can reduce battery life, which is a priority for many consumers.
My wife’s android phone has a 600mhz processor and it pretty much keeps up with my 1 ghz phone in processing speed. She also gets much better battery life and her phone is a smaller and a lot cheaper.
The beauty of Android is that is allows that old, outdated, mechanism known as “the market” to operate. Manufactures make phones that they hope will please the CONSUMERS, not Google. As a result, many great Android phones, in various sizes, with a different specs and features are out in the market, to appeal to the maximum number of consumers, and Anrdoid’s market share is exploding.
Some of the phones will fail and the manufacturers will learn from those failures and make better products (or get out of the business). But, overall, producing phones aimed at pleasing consumers, rather than a software company, is a far superior strategy.
Once again, I think we see Microsoft trying to figure out why Apple is so successful, and coming up with a "cargo cult" response.
Restricting options has always been Apple's hallmark -- they exert tremendous pressure to keep things a certain way (or limited number of ways). But that's a means to an end -- the end is the user experience as defined in the Apple Interface Guidelines. The restrictions only exist to accomplish a much larger and loftier goal.
Microsoft goes to copy Apple again, and believes that if they make a lot of similar restrictions, they will be similarly successful. Unfortunately, they don't have anything like Apple's history of successfully defining the user interface. *sigh*
But this is the typical Microsoft approach; just thrown more hardware at it! Efficient design is completely foreign to them.
This approach worked in the desktop PC world, but will not work so well in the mobile world.
The minimum specs are for now. Two years from now those specs will be a lower-level smartphone, if Microsoft doesn’t up the specs again.
I like this move. It ensures quality of experience across the board, something Android is sorely lacking. It also makes life much easier for the app developers. Currently, testing Android software is a royal PITA.