[smokinn]

I find it's rather that they take care of every detail. I refuse to buy an iPhone but I'm still not satisfied with the state of Android phones.

There's the phones with the great cameras (but are underpowered). There's the phones with the great cpus (but wasted because of low ram) There's the phones with the good extra UI (wasted because they're underpowered) There's the good middle ground handicapped by a really old version of Android and no multi-touch.

Etc.

Whereas the iPhone just has it all.

[lurkinggrue]

With Apple the shortcomings are sold as features and then later given to you as an innovation.

I almost expected them to release the iPhone shuffle that had no screen and randomly called people.

[tvon]

To an extent. Most companies seem to aim for a product that does well on a feature-grid of checkboxes more than in actual use. Apple would (apparently) rather that they had half the checkboxes but that those things worked very, very well (or intuitively, or smoothly, or in a magical way, etc).

In other words, it's not as if an iPhone friendly multitasking setup was available and they just ripped it out so they could have a big reveal two years later. In their eyes at least, the "innovation" is that they did it in an "Apple way".

[pyre]

I think the point is that Apple poo-poos the idea that a phone even needs a background API, then releases a background API to great fanfare as if they were the first ones to have such an idea, all the while patting themselves on the back. (i.e. "We weren't the first ones to do multi-tasking, but we were the first ones to do multi-tasking on the iPhone! Yay us!")

[zweben]

Pretty sure that's more marketing than anything to do with their product strategy. They release the best products they can, but implementing features better than their competitors means it takes them longer, so they talk down any feature they don't offer yet, and then hype it up once they offer it.

[glhaynes]

Yes, it's about making products, not just conglomerations of features.

[smokinn]

True. A background API only being offered just now is a good example.

[jackowayed]

That's starting to change. The Nexus One is very nice, the Droid Incredible (which is basically the same thing with a better camera) is even better, HTC Sense is a very nice interface, and in June, Sprint's going to get the Evo, which is basically an Incredible with an even better camera (takes 720p video), a front-facing camera, 4G, a 4.3" screen, and the ability to act as a wifi router.

[evgen]

And one day someone outside of the Apple campus is going to wake up and realize that a big bag of features is no longer enough; you have to combine them all into a seamless environment so that people[1] can actually take advantage of the cute bits of electronics you stuff into ever smaller packages.

[1] By "people" I mean the 99.999% of the world who do not bother to read instruction manuals, would never use a command-line interface, and once had vcrs whose clocks always read 12:00...

[barrkel]

With an Android phone you don't even need a PC (or Mac), unlike Apple's stuff.

[danudey]

With an iPhone or iPad, you can have it activated when you purchase it, buy music or apps wirelessly, add contacts, sync to MobileMe/Google/exchange, and do pretty much whatever you like.

I only connect my phone to my computer to do backups (because I don't want to lose my text messages), or to update apps >20MB (because I'm never on WiFi). You don't have to have a computer at all to use an iPhone. In fact, I have a friend who'd never sync'ed or backed up her iPhone once (and didn't know how to do it), and she used it without issues for well over a year before needing to do a backup.

I've never used Android, so I'm not sure what music store is available on the phone by default. Is it any good?