For me, the reason that I am curious about the difference is that I wonder whether there is a much better "secret" phone and a conspiracy to prevent it from reaching the American audience.

Either it's just a cultural bias, in which case I can buy an iPhone and not worry about missing out, or it's a real difference, and I want to know more about these phones that are so much better.

The final possibility is that this is just Wired Magazine, publishing the usual made-up story.

A friend pointed out to me once that one way to think of this whole thing, to make it make a little more sense, is to put the business model on its side.

A company like Google, for example -- most people would say that you and I, as searchers, are Google's customers. Instead, let's say that Google's "customers" are the advertisers, and their "product" is users (or, more concretely, the users' attention). By delivering "products" to "customers", they make money.

So a site that makes no money -- an early-stage dot-com that doesn't advertise yet, what are they doing? They're building up a warehouse of product, in the hope that once they have enough products, they can sell them to customers at a good price.