[kalid]

Not to pick on you, but this is a great example of why open source usability languishes.

Customers don't want to get into the nitty gritty on anything. A stock iPhone "just works" (syncing, videos, etc) without needing anything extra. It's hard to overvalue this.

Second, people love to do feature-by-feature comparisons. I liken this to having a choice between 1) a sandwich and 2) the same ingredients in a blender.

"Oh, the nutritional value is the same! It's easier to eat!" The value of "taste" (literal and figurative) is completely lost -- I don't know how to explain it aside from that. We don't want our food in liquid form, even though the results may be the same. Yet the blender vendor continues to be confused about why people don't want his "identical" (superior?) product.

And that's assuming the products are identical but packaged differently. Dozens of annoyances like "just install this, just tweak that" turn into "Just add salt, just microwave it, just use this spice and my blended concoction will be great!".

[nailer]

"A stock iPhone "just works" (syncing, videos, etc) without needing anything extra. "

Depends on what you're trying to do. Syncing with my iPhone required plugging in a cable and doing a manual sync. Syncing with Android doesn't really exist: it's just always up to date, and doesn't need syncing.

The default Android video player could support more formats out of the box could be better. Then again, there are about 50 useful, everyday things I can do with Android that I couldn't with my iPhone - see my contacts on the map, not lose data when closing apps, publically stream video direct from my phone to the web, copy files to the device.

Also iPhone Safari crashed constantly when reading large engadget articles on every iPhone firmware from 1.01 to 3.00. Android's browser is far more reliable.