Fight! Steve Jobs came out swinging at the Apple earnings call. We’re used to Steve Jobs Android hate but he was particularly vehement this time. He slammed the fragmentation of Google’s mobile OS, attacked tiny tablets and essentially put pay to the idea of an iPad mini. Still, after being caught out by the Steve Jobs misdirection machine in the past, we’re still not ruling out a smaller iPad…
After dismissing RIM’s Blackberry as yesterday’s man (which looking at the Blackberry Torch seems reasonable), Steve Jobs admitted that the fight is between Google and Apple: “I think at least now it’s a battle for developers and a battle for the mind share of developers and…customers. I think right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.”
It looks like Apple believes, despite its massive earnings, to effectively attack Android and Google. And there’s no better attack dog than Steve Jobs. His first line of argument was picking at Google’s figures: “Google has around 90,000 apps in their app store. Apple has activated around 275,000 iOS devices per day for the past 30 days with a peak of around 300,000 devices on a couple of those days and Apple has over 300,000 apps on its App Store. There’s no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter…”
Both Google and Apple massage their figures and don’t always give a true picture of how many handsets they’re actually shifting but Steve Jobs is right when he says the Android Market is a pretty confusing place these days. After he’d hit the Android Market where it hurts, Steve Jobs moved on to the perennial open vs closed fight:
“Google loves to characterise Android as open and iOS and iPhone as closed. We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing most of us think about when we hear open is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices. ??Unlike Windows, however, where most PCs have the same interface and use the same apps, Android is very fragmented. Many Android OEMs, including the two largest – HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The user is left to figure it all out. Compare that with iPhone where every handset works the same.”
Again that’s not a foolproof argument from El Jobso but it packs a pretty powerful punch. Steve Jobs used the example of Tweetdeck (which he erroneously calls Twitterdeck) to support his point: “Twitterdeck just launched its Android version and had to deal with 100 different versions of the Android OS and more than 200 different handsets.”
Those iPad mini rumours look to be pretty wide-of-the-mark too. Steve Jobs was scathing about rival tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Dell Streak and slammed 7in slates:
“We think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA-Dead on Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small, and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7in bandwagon with an orphan product. Sounds like lots of fun ahead.”
Then, after needling Google over the perceived failure of the Nexus One, Steve Jobs concluded that Android is “going to be a mess for both users and developers” and that “the open vs closed argument is just a smokescreen to hide the real argument: what’s best for the customer? Fragmented or integrated.”
What do you think? Is Steve Jobs right? Will the iPhone 4 and its seriously focused follow ups reign supreme or will the army of Android handsets make choice the key? Hit the comments and do battle.
