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Comment by stanleydrew | Hacker News Reader

There is tons of real competition. There will probably be 50 Android smartphones on the market by the end of the year, if not sooner. RIM and Symbian are still ahead, even if you see them as waning.

Yes consumers have no idea what any of this means. But that actually works in favor of Apple's competitors. When an average consumer looks at the smartphone market, Apple may stand out, but the iPhone is still just one among hundreds of smartphones. There is tons of competition on features and price.

Finally, Google doesn't need to kick it up a notch. Android is doing extremely well. Keep in mind that Google doesn't need Android to make money. Google doesn't care if Nexus One sales are sluggish. They are in the market to change the game. And I'd say they are succeeding with that.

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  There is tons of competition on features and price.

That's exactly the problem. Apple does not compete on features and price, they compete on user experience.

I don't understand why that's a problem.

It's easy to optimize product to cut costs, or put more engineers on the project and add features.

What's truly difficult is reduction. Removing "features" and simplifying the product. The success of the iPad and iPhone is not about what it-- it's about all the things it doesn't do.

Yes I've heard lots of people toe the Apple company line on simplifying before. But I thought we were talking about whether or not there is smartphone competition.

If you want to believe there is nothing that can truly compete with the iPhone because of its magical UI or lack of features or whatever I can't prevent that. Yes, it's true, the iPhone is the only iPhone in existence. But in that sense nothing can compete with Android either. Nobody else is producing an open-source smartphone os even close to its quality. If you get specific enough, everything is in a category of its own without any competition.

My original comment has nothing to do with whether Apple has produced the perfect mobile os by reducing and removing features. It has to do with the statement that Apple has no real competition.

"If you get specific enough, everything is in a category of its own without any competition."

Of course. The problem the parent is describing is that the smartphone market, the person on the street with an iPhone, who doesn't have a clue what "objective see" is, has his/her own specific criteria for buying a phone, and so far they seem to line up with Apple's criteria pretty well.

Android can compete on features, price, openness, open-source, goat-teleport-count, or any other metric they can find. It won't be "real competition", in this sense, until ordinary people find reasons to actually buy it in large numbers.

Good thing Android sales are on track to surpass the iPhone.

http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10005344/android-unit-sa...

+1 for openness.

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