The BoM of an iPhone is $180. Apple's margins on the device are massive. That's true for all manufacturers that sell their phones at retail.

Because Android is a laggy, buggy piece of trash that has horrible standby battery drain. Android is antiquated, a pre-iOS junkheap that should have been thrown away the moment iOS was first revealed. MSFT threw away Windows Mobile to develop WP7/8, Palm threw away Palm OS for webOS, RIM the old BB OS for the new QNX OS, and Nokia originally was transitioning away from Symbian for MeeGo. Google is the only one who decided to just rip off Apple as fast as possible by slapping on a touchscreen layer onto their outdated OS, and flip-flopped on Network Neutrality to sign a deal with Verizon to push the Droid brand.

That's why Android lags, and it's also got horrible battery life.

Will they include a HAL in Windows RT that allows people/hackers to install it on virtually any ARM architecture? Like... say an HP Touchpad?

Well the Intel tablets aren't going to be very powerful. ARM Cortex A9 is equivalent to Pentium 3, and A15 to Pentium 4. Medfield slots somewhere inbetween those two.

It's not even fair to Intel's competitors is it? Intel's so far ahead of everyone else at 22 nm, and will be moving their mobile chips to their latest and smallest process. It's rather unfortunate... I don't think anyone wants to see an Intel monopoly.

On the other hand in the short term we'll still need to see how good Medfield is. IIRC per core Linpack scores are lower than Cortex A15. And Intel's biggest issue is latency of sleep mode, which has historically been nowhere near as good as ARM hardware.

The only problem I have with the iPad is it doesn't have text reflow in the browser. My eyesight isn't that great, and if they'd just add that one feature it would be such a beautiful product.

Do you even need to be a corrupt, Wall Street "financier" to realize a billion dollars for cruddy instagram was too much?

Atom-based phone is coming out next week in India, and soon after in China. Not a "dream". Also the only way to ensure your Android phone will ever be upgraded.

So? That's how Symbian looked 5+ years ago. New smartphone activations in the US are trending towards iOS, and once a legitimate competitor comes out people will latch onto them instead of Android. The only thing preventing competition from swarming in is that Google dumps its OS for free, China-style.

Yeah and the Lumia has an even higher rating on Amazon. Yay for Nokia...?

Samsung especially put a lot of effort into tweaking the Android OS to make it smoother. But in the end it's still limited by its foundations, and comparing Android to any other modern OS (webOS, Maemo, QNX's OS, iOS, WP7) demonstrates a completely different level of fluidity and responsiveness, *especially* when run on a single-core CPU.

Because it's a laggy, buggy, pre-iOS trash OS. Unlike every other modern mobile OS it doesn't prioritize the UI thread and thus will never stop lagging, no matter how fast the hardware gets.

That phone is freaking amazing. MeeGo is ridiculously functional, smooth, and open. It's beautiful. Not the trashy piece of laggy junk that is Android- but instead a truly beautiful and open platform.

If Nokia had pushed MeeGo they would have been absolutely shocked at how well it would have sold. People are DESPERATE for an iOS alternative, and Android is such a sucky, laggy, buggy piece of trash that consumers would have lapped MeeGo up like water in a desert.

There's no such thing as a free market. There isn't a single market in the world that has zero barrier of entry, perfect competition, perfectly rational consumers, and so on and so forth. I hate it when people keep bandying about that term. It's just a hypothetical academic concept, like "frictionless surfaces" in high school physics.

Enforcement of greenhouse regulations actually forces corporations to invest more money into capital spending, which creates jobs.