[dgreensp]

The way I see it, if you look at the iPhone as a slightly faster IE8 plus a graphics card (plus string concatenation that doesn't memcpy and probably various other asymptotic or order-of-magnitude improvements in specific areas), you can do a lot with that. You can perfectly well argue about the less-well-supported facts and opinions in the original article that are used to interpret the performance facts.

For example, the anecdote about Wave that's supposed to demonstrate you can't do realtime collaboration on IE8. Well, I worked on Wave at Google (briefly) and it's no such proof. I also wrote EtherPad, which was realtime collaborative in IE6. You can't disqualify arguments of the type "I wrote an app one time" and then talk about the impossibility of writing apps.

The matter of whether phones will get yet faster is another great question, and one I'm not qualified to comment on, but I wouldn't bet against it.

I totally get the part about GC in a memory-constrained environment, photos, and the iPad's giant screen. However, the author of the original article doesn't stop before making many broad, indefensible claims.