A followup to one of my prior posts with some thoughts on the iPhone vs Android:

This positions Android, the mobile device operating environment developed by Google, to provide a direct challenge to the iPhone's dominance of the high-end consumer smartphone market in part by tapping markets that Apple, with its over-controlling attitude and purposeful strategy of building its own hardware and providing exclusive deals to individual carriers, has ignored.

Apple's strategy worked well for it and for AT&T when the iPhone was the only show in town. However, its big weakness is that it ignored the large potential market of users of other carriers in each market besides the one Apple chose to bless. In the U.S., that is the majority of the market. As long as Android lacked the smooth, advanced functionality of the iPhone and only sold through Sprint and T-Mobile, which are both secondary players in the U.S. market, that was not a major threat. Now, however, Android ... seems to have caught up in technology and has added Verizon, along with AT&T one of the two dominant U.S. carriers.... And because Google, unlike Apple, has chosen to focus on developing the operating environment and user interface and then partner with several cell phone hardware manufacturers, it is only a matter of time before other Android 2.0 cell phones and potentially other devices, designed to appeal to different sets of users, appear on the market. ...

Apple's desire for absolute control has caused it to make a second major strategic error, as well. Its iron fisted control over third-party applications on the iPhone through its App Store, the only source of applications may be driving third-party application vendors away. It has shown that control by pulling applications already in the App Store and refusing to allow others to access the market. Some of these decisions seem to be capricious. That means that third-party developers, most small organizations, take a big risk when they invest in developing something beyond games and ephemeral entertainment applications for the iPhone market. Apple also does not allow third-party applications to access the calendar, contacts, and other personal information management (PIM) databases on the iPhone, which means no add-on advanced calendar, contact management and similar applications such as those that appeared on the original Palms and Windows Mobile PDAs.

Android, by comparison, is open source. That means that everything is potentially open, and third party developers are invited to play. In the Palm marketplace of the 1990s that openness resulted in a huge amount of creativity and the development of some very nice applications, some of them noticeably superior to anything available on the desktop at the time.

I expect Android to gain early adoption with techies and then move to parity with the iPhone fairly quickly. Of course, I'm betting on the Firefox model more than the Linux one, but either way I think it's a good thing for consumers in both the personal and corporate spheres.