If Samsung had changed a single thing on their products there would be no case. Square buttons or a different colour or differently shaped speakers. Anything and the case would never have even been filed.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no face buttons at all. The earlier (7") Galaxy Tab had four face buttons (not one), and none of them looked anything at all like home buttons on iOS devices. Sure looks like Samsung changed (at least) "a single thing"...
Your argument would hold more weight if it weren't for the fact that AT&T has had many negative effects on iOS despite the fact that iOS isn't open. (recent example: tethering) So yes, carriers can exploit the openness of Android to screw their customers, but they also can, and have, make Apple do their bidding. So it appears that the issue of whether your carrier will screw up your phone is orthogonal to whether the OS is "open". In that case, I'll take open.
A few things off the top of my head:
Install an alternate input method (eg: Swype), run an emulator that lets you run downloaded software (eg: Ftodo 64 or NESoid), automatically adjust volume settings based on criteria like location, time or phone orientation (eg: Locale, Off the hook or Volume timer), automatically upload photos/videos to sharing services (eg: Pic push).
Don't forget that it wasn't too long ago that you couldn't even play Pandora in the background on the iPhone, and even now the multitasking on iOS is bizarrely restricted (eg: you can do arbitrary things in the background as long as you also audio).
Yes it is. Type alt-+
Does he have a time machine? How did he write an article about XML that predates HTML by years when HTML predates XML?
Holy run-on sentence Batman!
Periods are a renewable resource. Feel free to use them.
Using that logic you could ignore the developer agreement restrictions entirely by having virtually all of your code in a "library". Your application would then be just an entry point that calls into the library.
Any libraries you link into your app are part of your app and are subject to the same restrictions.
The developer agreement says "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine". There are no provisions for using other languages for any part of your application. Need to use a numerical library written in Fortran, or a parser written in ANTLR? Too bad.
I love car analogies. No, Ford does not prohibit you from installing a Chevy engine in your Mustang. They also do _NOTHING_ to enable you.
Actual technical limitations are fine. Artificially imposed legal/contractual limitations aren't.
More specifically: I don't expect Apple to provide a compiler for my favorite language (which is not Flash, I should add). If they only provide an Objective-C compiler I'm fine with that. On the other hand, if someone develops a compiler that can convert code from my favorite language into Objective-C, then I am not okay with Apple saying "you can't use that tool - you have to hand-write your code in Objective-C".
I don't know that I'd go as far as to say that what Apple is doing isn't within their rights, but that doesn't mean I have to like what they're doing. They're handicapping their developer base by limiting the tools they can use. Some developers will stay and put up with the handicaps, and others will leave. I have a hard time believing that that will work out for them in the end.
You're thinking of Macs. This is about iPhone OS.
So if I write a C compiler in [insert slowest language you can think of here] then C programs compiled with that compiler would be no faster than [insert slowest language you can think of here]? Sorry, no, that isn't the way it works.
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
