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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_mobile_phone_platf...

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> If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS.

> Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone

As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything. Of course, what actually emerged into production was iPhone-like because by then the market had moved in that direction.

>As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything.

wrong.

Absolutely. Google couldn't possibly have been doing anything with full-screen touch-based smartphones. They were a software company and weren't working with anyone who'd built such a device before.

</sarcasm>

Sorry, for all that I wasn't personally a fan, I remember how amazing the O2 XDA (and its its immediate relatives) were at the time and I have to stick up for them (and HTC, of course).

Exactly. Picking individual feature to judge innovation is like saying Sydney Opera House is not interesting because the concrete, the flooring, the paint and window are pretty much the same as any one of the boring office buildings; and Golden Gate Bridge is just a bridge because it's still a bridge-looking bridge built with bridge-building materials.

Like design of any architecture, a consumer product is always a package of many components. Knowing what component to keep and what not to and tuning each to best please the user and work together are the art and the kind of innovation that is the most difficult to find.

And you know people are copying/stealing just by looking at it:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjetjep/4100430224/ - http://micgadget.com/8168/shanzhai-sydney-opera-house/

Pre-iPhone, they were also demoing devices that did not look quite so much like Blackberry clones:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...

November 2007 isn't exactly pre-iPhone?

> We're talking November 12 2007

iPhone was announced January 2007 and released June 2007. That's hardly pre-iPhone.

And I think the real point of contention was that Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board starting a year before that and as such had seen early iPhone prototypes. That in particular is what Jobs was angry about.

I can guess why that's a much bigger point of contention.

Steve Jobs must have really sold the board on the viability of next-gen smart phones: "guys - our work on iPods shows us we are just about at the point where almost-PC-class processors, RAM, and hard drives can be crammed into a mobile-phone sized package, without wiping out the battery in 12 hours. You know what will happen next?"

If that was the reason Google put so much effort into Android, then Google effectively stole Apple's strategy. Sure, some random Googlers would have thought of it, but it may not have been sold as well at the top level. Remember, Steve Jobs was an unbelievably good strategy salesman.

It's inevitable then that Android would follow the market leader - that's what products do.

But now you're mixing up the chronology.

Google had already bought Android and bet on next-gen smartphones well before Eric Schmidt joined the Apple board. And that bet was already serious and high-level. Schmidt wasn't involved in the acquisition, but Larry Page was. They were also, correctly, talking about mobile as the "next great frontier of search". If that wasn't a big deal at Google, I don't know what could be.

Apple did not invent multitouch however they did invent how it was used to make a phone with a very specific interface that was then copied feature for feature by Google who had intimate knowledge of its design.

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