Look M5, evidently I don't like Apple either, but some of their features are interesting, and it is in wise to look at a (growing) competitor. If Jerome saw more potention in the iPhone he wouldn't make his point here; it'd be a waste of his time.

Apple is, as far a I'm concerned, one of the market leaders when it comes to usability. They also have some clever solutions (e.g. Skyhook Wireless instead of real GPS was a clever hack). The GNOME and GNUStep teams are inspired by Apple, and Maemo is partly by GNOME.

People who are into marketing related subjects would like to disagree with you that he was a genius (not that you don't honor him as genius; who you honor is up to you). I've seen a documentary about him. He was, before CoS, widely regarded as a good hypnotist. He made thousands of people believe in his fairy tales, not in the way of George Lucas or J.K. Rowling; no, he actually made them subscribe to his bullocks. He was also friends with some people in the higher echelons of USA before he started CoS. He'd probably have been a great asset for the MKULTRA project. Likewise, you might be able to admire a German WWII officer like general Rommel or admiral Dönitz for [some] of their qualities while disagreeing with the ideology they were fighting for.

Okay.... you make great points, plus I have had my morning coffee now and am much calmer.

A close friend of mine just sent me an email saying he purchased a Google G1 yesterday. I am going to go over and take a look at it right now.

Have a nice day All.

There are some nice things about Apple products, but they come at a high price (and I'm not talking about €/$). But still: most of what's hyped as "superior usability" is just superior cosmetics and most of the time much worse usability than any other comparable system... People just don't realize because it looks so nice. (Do you still need to go to the lower right corner of a window to change its size in OSX or did they fix this meanwhile?)

The good thing from my point of view is total integration. Total desktop integration and total integration across devices using iTunes. This is really sexy. I have to admit I love the idea.

But: It only works because they force end users and developers into certain constraints. You could have the same amount of desktop integration for, say, contact data if somebody would force all GNU/Linux developers to only use the evolution data server and, maybe, telepathy on top. Would be convenient. But we'd loose all the freedom and flexibility.
Same with sync services: There are many services out there that each do a part of what iTune does. Maybe if you're clever you find a combination that does most of what iTunes can do, and still you'd miss a lot of features. So would be want iTunes? No. I wouldn't want to be forced to use one way of data exchange. I want choice. I want to be able to use separate services for business data and private data. I want to do it my way.

So, as sexy as all this Apple-style integration is, I wouldn't want it as long as it takes away my freedom of choice. So what we could do is get close... at least offer frameworks developers can use, offer an application store they can upload their projects to. But this is already happening. There is a consistent framework for contact data on Maemo - only developers don't use it (or does Gizmo access the EDS? No!). There is the "Extras" repository - and while the situation has much improved since my last rant, still there are packages that are not in it. So, that's life. Freedom of choice also means freedom of choice for those who don't want to make their own product more sexy. I'll gladly live with this as long as the alternative is an Apple-style closed universe.

whats needed is some kind of generic data exchange system, so that software can talk to each other independent of what they use internally.

so that if you want to, you can pop out the existing contacts app, insert a new one and still have all the others that expect a contacts app to be there to find the data they want.

iirc, google was aiming for a system like that in android, so that third party programs could replace existing systems in android without any lack of bindings.

dont know if it got into the final version tho, at least outside of a a vendor/operator only lock...

@ Benny

Not only integration in that sense. The interface is coherent. Its object oriented, so e.g. interfaces and shortcuts are coherent. If I ask you what F5 and F7 did in DOS applications I know what your answer will be. Sure, Windows and open source DE have this too, but Apple takes this one step further. There are some nice NextStep/OpenStep/GNUStep demos which demonstrate this.

Something else the iPhone does right is allowing full screen focus to the user. Wayfinder/Navicore, Carman, OMWeather, Fennec and some other applications do this as well; but definetely not all.

An abstraction API for Google, Facebook, etcetera which can be used by an application such as Pidgin plugin as well as Bitlbee, a blogger program, or a Firefox/MicroB/Fennec extension is a Good Thing.

If you want sexy and good performance you can learn from Enlightenment DR17. If you'd study that community you'd notice how they care about optimizing and how these people are artists (besides being programmer), and have a hard time releasing a stable

XFce wasn't mentioned, but they go more for performance than GNOME. Yet, you can see the 'Mac' influence in both.

(Please note there are also influences by e.g. AmigaOS, BeOS, NextStep; its just that Apple has survived whereas these OSes either vanished or got cloned or integrated into new products.)

tso: this would only shift the problem to another level. now, as a developer, you should use the EDS backend. - when they move away from EDS to some more generic data exchange system, what would you gain? you could choose not to use EDS but some other system that understands the same data format and calls defined in a generic data format. but you'd still have to adhere to those standards to achieve the integration.

so whatever you do, its always some kind of constraints. you can't just do as you like and still have a fully integrated desktop.

I don't understand.... what do you mean by "allowing full screen focus to the user"?

So long as you are on the same type of network nothing untoward happens. I have a Chinese iPhone knock off that works on the ATT network. I have another Chinese phone with better features that also works on the ATT network. I can put in a T-mobile sim and go to town with that too.

The real problem is finding a no-name phone that supports the 850Mhz band which is crucial for indoor reception.

neo freerunner?