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Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

The main competitive advantage of the iPhone is not the features. It's the overall polish and UI.

Agreed. I haven't held the Droid, but most video reviews of the interface reveal a need to re-click items and a delay in scrolling/reacting to touch commands. That's my impression anyway. This doesn't happen with regularity on the iPhone.

I'm not saying this is a show-stopper; Android will get there. What's amazing, however, is that we're almost 3 years past Steve Jobs' first demo of the iPhone at Macworld, January 2007. I still can't believe how well they nailed it, first time.

I own an iPhone, but I love the open nature of Android. Whatever the Droid may lack in fit and finish it is going to be more than made up for by the degree of control it places in the owner's hands.

> What's amazing, however, is that we're almost 3 years past Steve Jobs' first demo of the iPhone at Macworld, January 2007. I still can't believe how well they nailed it, first time.

Let's not forgot that many features were missing from the initial iPhone release, and that there were rumors of the iPhone for years (i.e. how long were they working on it pre-release?). I imagine that the internals could have been a mess too; there was no SDK for that initial release other than "Use AJAX and Safari to make Web Apps for the iPhone! Yay!".

Yeah, and a year later they had the app store, and they nailed that.

That's the exact point of the guy you replied to. Apple doesn't always win feature battles, but it always wins in terms of how perfect its existing features are.

Well it's obvious that in the balance between look & feel and features, Apple went with the look & feel with the goal of features later.

That turned out to be a good choice.

I would say the iPhone ui is VERY impressive and Apple is definitely the leader in terms of user experience and interface.

However, I'd say Google is almost just as strong in this department. I love the UI on Android 2.0 and it will only get better. I'm not missing anything from the iPhone UI and from my blog post... it just feels like "a breath of new air." It's nice to play with a new interface that works just as well as the iPhone.

To add to this - the only thing that I miss from the iPhone UI is that "spring action" when you scroll too far, it'll spring past the content then back up. I liked this effect and the android has the spring... just not the spring back.

e.g if you scroll really fast it'll just stop at the end of the content vs going past it then back up.

The iPhone's main competitive advantage is that it is made by Apple. They are cannibals. Apple is willing to eat red delicious in order to develop the best product possible; they will constantly release upgrades, iterations, and new products to beat the previous one. Will Motorola do the same? The StarTac and Razr tell me no. Hopefully, they have changed.

Apple will probably always make something that's a bit nicer, but (hopefully) Android will be 'good enough', and win out on being more open and more friendly to those who want to hack with and on the platform. I for one have no interest at all in doing mobile were it to come to be exclusively controlled by Apple.

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