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.