Now, Droid's ad is taking cheap shots at Apple, and that's a bad start. If your ad campaign is based solely on dissing your competitor, chances are you don't have anything revolutionary.
Look at the promises it makes. "Real keyboard" - yeah, so does every other phone, but they're getting criticized for it now, so this doesn't mean anything unless the keyboard's astonishingly good. "Simultaneous apps" - maybe we care about that, but the average user looks at that and sees gibberish. "5 megapixel pictures" - probably the least sexy way to advertise a camera ever, especially if you're not comparing your photo quality to the 3GS's. "Customize" - doesn't mean as much to most users as a lot of companies seem to think. "Widgets" - what the fuck are widgets supposed to be in the context of a phone? "Open development" - again, Joe Watchescommercials won't give a shit about this. "Pictures in the dark," "interchangeable batteries" - Jesus fucking Christ, if these are your selling points you've already fucking lost.
Companies seem to think that fighting the iPhone is simply a matter of creating a product with slightly better features in certain areas. (Either that or that's the merely impression they're trying to give to the public, while they secretly know just how screwed they are here—I'd bet on the latter. Companies aren't usually stupid.) It's not. If you want better features than an iPhone, you've got Blackberry, which incidentally is doing very well now without attempting to directly compete with Apple in any way. But the iPhone is untouchable. We're talking a cell phone that sparked the revolution, that's designed by the most reputed company on the planet, by the most famous designers on the planet, that pioneered not only multitouch but the app store model that's being leeched everywhere, and whose design is possibly unbeatable in terms of simplicity. Other companies aren't even trying to be simpler; they're attempting to be nearly as simple. I'd bet Apple's figuring out how to make a phone that's even more physically minimal right now, though, because Apple doesn't rest.
I go to a city school right now; two months ago I was watching over young children; in both scenarios the iPhone is equally prevalent. The only modern phone people recognize on sight is the iPhone. People without an iPhone get a shitty phone and an iPod touch.
And Verizon thinks that it's possible to lower its reputation, which is hilarious. The iPhone is the single strongest brand in the country, possibly on the planet. What Verizon knows or ought to know is that part of that brand is an anti-phone brand. The iPhone was the first phone that said "fuck you" to a decade of sterile designs and complicated set-ups. It was a "fuck you" to Verizon and its insistence on over-branding its products. It was a phone that suggested an incredible potential in mobile devices, not just in breakthrough technology but in personal happiness, which is something Apple, despite its being an asshole of a company, cares about a lot. And after it invented its revolutionary new phone model, then other companies decided maybe they could make cool new things too, and they're making them by ripping off the iPhone.
It's possible to make a beautiful phone without once winking over Apple's way. No American company does it. Look at all the phones designed by Naoto Fukasawa. He's shown that it's possible to make multiple phones without overlapping ideas and keep them all memorable products. We have no memorable phones in the US, except for the iPhone. Until companies decide it's time to start competing by making good products, we won't have any.