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Comment by harshpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a bad way to compare the two devices. In particular, love it or hate it, the original iPhone had to fight a big uphill battle towards adoptions. When android was later released, smartphones had already been quite well accepted amongst the masses, and did not have to fight many of the same battles that the iphone did.

I'm not really sure what conclusion he is trying to go for...

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>I'm not really sure what conclusion he is trying to go for...

I don't think he is trying to draw a conclusion, in fact he specifically says "One should be careful about drawing conclusions..."

Sometimes data are just data.

Apple didn't invent the smartphone market. There already was a smartphone market dominated by Symbian.

Symbian manage to screw up enough that by the time the iPhone came out they had such a poor UX that it's no wonder the iPhone succeeded.

Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Palm were all players then too.

Based on iPhone's first day sales, their "uphill battle towards adoption" looked more like a rolling down the hill.

With a help of a rocket engine.

I think Apple generally goes for the first mover advantage. I think that's great.

I don't think there is any problem with Android using the way paved by Apple and taking it a different direction.

Competition begets better products at cheaper prices, what more could a consumer ask for?

Apple is rarely a first mover. It wasn't with ipods and wasn't with touchscreen smartphones. They blatantly ripped off Ericsson and LG. It's not nice how apple rewrites recent tech history.

It's actually about 15 devices, one of which is Apple's, and the remaining 14 belonging to other companies. For some reason people were always quick to illuminate this important detail when it came to comparing other mobile platforms in the past (BBOS vs Symbian etc.), but in this particular "battle" no one wants to touch the fact that Apple are entirely alone on the iOS side, facing all of the other giants on the market.

Err, its not one device, its ipad, ipod, and iphone. So its three devices and if you count versions, dozens.

Well, by that metric, the Android camp is up to well over 100 devices. I guess you got my point anyway :) (one vendor vs craploads of vendors)

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