[zedwill]

The article mentions Apple as it had made the iphone and the app store out of thin air. It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true.

It is a pity Palm shooted itself after successful devices like Palm Pilot or Tungsten. Palm could have made the iphone. It had extensive experience in touch screen devices. It had previous endeavors in phone-pda hybrids like the Treo.

Palm could have made the jump, if only they haven't split in palm one and palm source and keep the good work on.

And the same story happens with Amazon Kindle and similar devices. I have been reading ebooks in Palm (thanks to plucker, great open source reader) for ages before ebook readers even existed.

[rimantas]

It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true.

So they did make one? If they did not, how is that not true?

[stse]

Because the smartphone market is a small part of the global market. The iphone is also one of the most expensive phones around. In a few years when the market gets more mature we will see a lot more competition from the "other manufacturers". Most of which also provides telecommunication systems.

[zedwill]

Obviously they din't, if so we would be talking of the pPhone now.

[joezydeco]

I take a slight objection to the statement that Android wasn't there until the iPhone came along.

The project was underway long before Google picked them up in 2005, and development on this idea of an open-source phone OS was going on without knowing what Apple was doing. And sure, iPhone is a more robust platform, but there were inklings of a 'free-the-phone-from-the-carrier' movement without Apple's involvement. There were also smaller mobile linux projects underway like Qtopia and Maemo.