Go tell your mom about the new features that Froyo has. Watch her eyes glaze over as you talk about "cloud-to-phone messaging APIs" and "APIs to make app data searchable".
Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.
Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.
"OOooo... I can actually read some of the text on that one!" she'll say.
Pixel density is nice and all, but a lot of people would rather have a bigger screen.
This illustrates Android's biggest advantage and biggest weakness versus iOS. Choice.
The trick for Google is to introduce some standards that will make different Android phones more consistent. Hell, they could do the same thing for the hardware. Crank out a cellphone chipset that manufacturers can customize instead of rolling their own and then being 8 months behind the latest Android release, if even that! Then the variety of Android phones out there will be a true strength and not a weakness.
I find android phones offering bigger and bigger screens a distraction. Sure, it suits some people, but most people are just going to find that phone too big.
Which is why you can get smaller android phones as well. With iPhones they come in one size, and if it isn't the perfect size for you, the you either have to learn to live with it or not get an iPhone. With Android you can chose smaller than iPhone, same size as iPhone or larger than iPhone depending on personal preference.
The Droid has been shipping for 8 months with a 265 ppi display; funny how that was a meaningless spec that only geeks care about until recently.
I work at Apple (recent hire, admittedly), and there's a big focus on communication (part of the 'Apple Way') rather than on geeky stuff. I suspect that this isn't the case at Google.
ps. I'm not saying this to act like a fanboy towards my employer (really, I'm not). Experiment: ask someone to name 3 or 4 android phone models. Watch their eyes glaze over. They may ask: "what's Android?" The point I'm making is that there's the iPhone, which most people have heard of, and then there's the mass of confusion from other manufacturers. This is the case in other product lines too, such as MacBooks vs pc laptops.
Essentially every laptop / tablet / whatever-PC in use in the medical field works similarly - they use one application which handles all relevant data, and it doesn't search outside that. And this is on a PC, which is essentially wide open to application interoperability (if not as easy to do). Developers and users have already apparently decided that it's not as important / desirable as many would like to believe.
Granted, there are cases where this is useful, but it's a fundamental iOS / Android(/Unix) design choice. Android favors interoperation through APIs, iOS favors using one application for the job at hand.
Why, if you're searching for symptom X, would you want to find emails with X, text messages with X, and that image which just happens to contain X in its filename?
Know of a search API which properly handles (every possible use of) context? Without that, people distrust searching because of irrelevant results. Google does well because of PageRank; as far as I'm aware, nobody has arbitrary-context searching which is effective, because it's such a ridiculously complex and/or processing-intensive problem. Such a filter would probably be integral to passing the Turing test, so we'd probably have heard of it if it existed.
The context space is much smaller on a device like a phone and it's quite possible to craft a query that finds what you need faster than finding the app, opening it finding the search option then typing it in.
On my Android phone I love the search feature. It's a lot like having quicksilver on my phone. A single button that gets me access to everything.
I may very well be inflating things, but the instant you mention "craft a query" you've lost 99% of people, minimum. They'll type "lupus", and give up if they don't find what they want. Or "Tom", and stop trying if they don't find Greg and Lupus as well. And then resort to finding the information through whatever roundabout means they last succeeded in.
Beware the average user's depth of knowledge of your system; many don't understand how to use tabbed browsing, and possibly more use Google to find the Facebook login page despite the login link appearing at all times when you're logged out. If you're trying to get as many people as possible, you've gotta plan for the bottom to be as functional as possible. And there are more at the bottom than at the top.
Edit: I see discussion of gamut. To quote http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_One_ShootOut.htm: The Color Gamut of the Nexus One is much larger than the industry standard … which is actually bad because it makes all colors appear too strong and over-saturated. … all they do it distort the colors in the images and photos on-screen
What good is it to have a larger gamut if the software doesn't support it? All graphics online & in apps use standard sRGB color space information. There’s simply nothing to display outside of that gamut in 99.9%+ of cases.