Matias Duarte on the philosophy of Ice Cream Sandwich

As a rule, Apple minimizes these kinds of things in the core interface and often moves quickly to reduce them as new features become common knowledge. For example, the "dock" in the original iPhone looked like a speaker grill - it was probably a useful convention to denote to people that had never used OSX that it was a special section at the bottom of the phone/screen. Now it's a glassy reflective surface that subtly denotes the dock area and nicely borders the screen (much more subtly than the ICS dock, IMO). The scrollbars in OSX were once colorful and rounded, but steadily and gradually became flatter, grayer, and then basically invisible. I wouldn't be surprised if the now prevalent "fabric" pattern sees a similar fate.

Apple tends to make the metaphors glaringly obvious and keep them around in a certain class of very simple apps (the compass and calculator fall under this). It's funny that Duarte mentioned wood because Apple nerds have been arguing about the wood trim in Garageband (a spinoff from the sleek, German designed Logic app) since it launched. For power users, these things are a stupid distraction, but for the %90 of the population that is boggled by the idea of using a completely new class of software, they denote that this is fun, easy-to-use software. Google, who've made plenty of great products that have gone relatively unused, could probably learn a few things here.

There's a certain logic to the anti-skeutomorph thing, but it gets weird when it leads to dismissing Apple offhandedly. Mastery of these metaphors is a good part of the reason Apple are where they are today. It's amazing how consistent these textures, gestures and animations are across three platforms (and how smoothly they reached this point) while the other platforms are having identity crises.

I should add that I'm enormously tempted to get the Galaxy Nexus, so please take this as pro-Apple, not anti-Google.

Example: samsung wrote their own camera app. For reasons that are clear only to them, it refuses to work (literally, it pops up a message box and exits) if the battery charge is less than 15%. I'm sure they thought they were "conserving" battery (because clearly they know better than me how I want to spend my battery energy). But of course the real effect is that this is a $250 phone that won't take pictures in the evening. And this is routine in the market, Samsung is hardly the only offender. That's the disaster Google is hoping to avoid.

You get the effect you want already, there's been a number of "official Google phones": the G1, the Nexus One, the Nexus S, and soon the Galaxy Nexus. These are Google-only, no-crapware phones, designed to showcase the newest Android offerings in the best light.

With iOS, there's only the one blessed option. You get one new phone a year. If it's a feature-bump like the 3GS or 4S, then that's what you get.

With Android, you not only get the Google-branded Official Phones, but you also get an entire ecosystem of devices to suit any taste. Want a hardware keyboard? You got it. 4.5-inch screens too big for you? Not a problem, plenty of options.