OK, I’m going to go out on a limb and be all predicty.  There is a lot of noise about how Google’s Android is about to run rough shod all over the iPhone.  I don’t believe it.  In fact Android will be in about the same place as Windows Mobile in a few years. (That’s the prediction part.)

So why do I think that hundreds of Android phones won’t kill a few iPhones?  (Re-read my question before preceding.)  Android is an operating system that will run on many different combinations of hardware.  There is no guarantee that any two android devices have the same specs and therefore it will hard to develop (killer) apps for Android.  I had a Palm back in the day and when you went to download software there would be a list of devices the software would work on and devices it wouldn’t.  That was by one company who controlled both software and hardware.  It means that a killer app for one Palm often did not run on the other Palms.  And unlike PCs, apps for smart phones don’t have an adaptive OS or device drivers to help them out.

The iPhone is often mistaken as a smartphone.  In actuality, like a Mac it is an experience.  Yes, that sounds a lot like I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, but it really is the only way to describe the Apple philosophy.  Apple treats the iPhone as both a personal computer and a console.  The former is illustrated in that some models of iPhone have capabilities that others don’t.  This is mostly because of actual hardware differences in the different iPhones.  But by treating the iPhone as a video game console developers know they have a fixed target to develop for.  They always know the screen resolution and the input method.  There are no questions about what devices the program might end up on.  All iPhones have a minimum base level with a few more options on different models.

Of course this prediction is beased on Apple sticking to the formula it has.  If it creates a iPhone 4G with a higher resolution display then we get into the situation with Palm and start down the same path as Android.  Change too much of the underlying hardware and you fracture your own base.  Luckily there is only so much you can do with an item that is constrained by its own size.

So what about the rumoured iTablet?  It’s not an iPhone in the same way that the iPhone is not a Mac.  The tablet platform may have many things in common with the iPhone (an OS and input methods for instance), but the tablet will have its own App store and ecosystem.  See the way to get away from having multiple devices running the same OS is to differentiate the devices into different categories.  I love my iPhone and I use it for email, browsing, tweeting and even making phone calls, but a tablet would be much better for reading and writing documents.  DocumentsToGo on a 10″ tablet is a viable alternative to a net/notebook.  I can do more real computer stuff on it, but it’s not an iPhone.  Developers will be familiar with programming for the new device, but it will have it’s own base level that all developers will be able to develop for.  Another similar platform, not another device running the same OS.

Iain.