WebOS 2.0 will include node.js

You're entitled to your opinion, I guess, but every phone made with a QWERTY keyboard has had modifier keys.

The Blackberry has Shift, Alt and Sym; Nokia has shift plus an blue numeric shift, and the iPhone has Shift and "123".

I'm honestly not sure how you'd even have a phone without modifier keys; there's just no good way of cramming enough buttons in the right layouts onto the phone without them. At bare minimum, people want upper and lower-case QWERTY for text entry, the telephone-style 123/456/789/0 number pad for phone numbers, plus a reasonable number of easily-accessible symbols. Even with an on-screen keyboard, I don't think you're going to do it without modifier keys or something like them, and I think you'd be hard pressed -- given the familiarity users have with modifier keys -- to do better.

If we're kvetching, though, why don't more phones allow you to enter phone numbers as alphanumeric, and do the conversion to numbers behind-the-scenes? I shouldn't have to fire up some 3rd party app in order to dial "1800 GO FEDEX" ... I should be able to type that right in like any other number and have the phone figure out that G=4, O=6, etc. The Blackberry lets you hold down Alt and type, but that's awkward and doesn't let you easily recognize a miskey. It seems trivial, yet no manufacturer seems inclined to fix it.

I agree that the cost is the reason, but saying that it's $3k cheaper is seriously misrepresenting things. The marginal cost of getting an Android phone over a normal one is $30/month for the data plan, so $720 in America and I guess $1080 if you're in Canada (that sucks, btw). And then you can probably subtract $50 or $100 or so because you'd probbly pay a bit more for an unsubsidized iTouch-oid than for the subsidized phone.

Google has no direct-to-consumer sales worth talking about. Phone carriers sell Android phones because they make money on the contracts; without the contracts they have little incentive to stock, market, or sell an Android equivalent of the iPod Touch. So who's going to step up to compete with the Apple Stores and the iTunes installed base? The same electronics companies that blew their years-long headstart in the personal music player business?

I don't think he meant "there are 3 ways this is not exciting".

But it isn't a negativity at all. It is my opinion. I'd said long ago, that making apps in Javascript for a phone is a ridiculous idea, and was nothing but a marketing illusion (they will tell you that Javascript is the most widely used language in the world just because any schoolchild wrote something with getElementById at least once.) But when you look at this approach from an system engineering point of view, you probably will see, that it is artificial abstraction level, with enormous overhead, and it wasn't designed for this purpose. (What's good for a PC cannot be pushed into ARM-world. That is why Flash for Android is a failure and why Android also released a C++ DK. ARM systems still cannot afford the overhead of all those artificial layers, such as Flash or other popular PC stuff.

Of course, with V8 which is producing an optimized native code for an ARM cpu, situation will look a little better, but still, you need an efficient resource management and control (think that there is no swap).

So, clang++ is the obvious answer (that is why Apple spend money to it), but ordinary getElementById developer cannot understand and code memory management. That's why all marketers are trying to push garbage-collecting artificial blobs.

The good side is that if you learn how to program you can use appropriate tools (C/C++).