It's not something Android can/can't do. From an average consumer's point of view, Android and WinMo and S60 and.... are all equal. It's a matter of taste, really, like the color of your wallpaper.

What's really bad about Android is its licensing and the way it fragments the community of developers who may be interested in developing for a Linux-based platform specifically.

These things matter for me because I didn't choose a GNU/Linux based platform for technical or practical reasons (there aren't any) but only for ideological and political reasons.

Android is being hyped as an open platform, which in fact it is not. You can get the components and their source code, yes, but what's on a handset may be closed source, proprietary code with changes applied by the vendor that will never find their way back to any "upstream" (whatever upstream is in Android).
It's a perfect example of commercial companies taking advantage of and abusing the idea of "open source" without giving back. (It's also a very good example for two schools of thought: "open source" versus "free software".)

The other thing with Android is that it creates yet another, incompatible ecosystem. You cannot easily port existing apps and libraries to Android (as you can with Maemo). This is not bad as such (you cannot port desktop applications to Symbian, can you?), but the way Google markets Android makes people believe it can be done. After all, it's just Linux, isn't it?

Oh yes, and finally, there's Google. Google is bad, and Android handsets are tightly integrated with Google. I don't try to keep away from Google as good as I can in my every day web life and then go for an Android phone when S60 does the same.


Nokia, btw, are performing much, much better here with Maemo. They're using decent licenses for the open components and push changes upstream. They use the same environment you'd find on a desktop platform, making it easier for applications to run both on a tablet and on the desktop with only a few changes. Given these high standards set by Nokia, Android really cannot compete.