As someone with both iPhone and Android (G1) phones in her bag, I can honestly say I prefer the iPhone for my day-to-day phone use. Most of the complaints I've had about the G1 are echoed in the other threads on here: the market's search engine being some sort of sick joke (especially sad considering the market is written by /Google/), the update method for apps being frustrating in the extreme if you have more than one app to update at a time, the fact that my phone runs about as fast as chilled molasses if I've let too many things -- even the things that start themselves up as services without my intervention -- run in the background, etc.

(Some of my problems might be addressed with the Hero, which I haven't had a chance to play with.)

However, you are absolutely, completely, 100% right that Locale is Android's killer app. You can have the phone auto-mute itself when you are in a movie theater. It can play a noise and pop up an alert when you're within a block of the grocery store, reminding you to pick up your groceries. And it has plugins, so all KINDS of other stuff can be automated. Astrid (a great todo list program for Android) can integrate with Locale to attach locations to task reminders, and since Astrid syncs with RememberTheMilk, you can bring your RTM items in the same way.

Honestly, Astrid+Locale should be marketed /heavily/ as one of Android's killer apps. That's something neither the iPhone nor the Palm Pre can do, and where the Android solution works /very/ well.

The BBC iPlayer does the same thing to American users, with a 'Not available in your territory' overlay message for, well, almost everything on their site save BBC News clips. This includes all the little embedded flash clips scattered across the Beeb's website and embedded in articles on other sites. Which is annoying, since trailers, cast interviews and video diaries for BBC-produced series which used to be put on YouTube are now on region-restricted iPlayer. (I suppose I can understand this when dealing with full episodes, but cast interviews, trailers or video diaries from on the set? Really, that seems excessive.)

The brand new SkyOne streaming media extravaganza for Xbox 360 will be only in the UK, too, though at least that's not an embedded thing you're likely to run across in a random web article.

There's plenty of annoying region lockouts going on there, not just in America. I suspect this comes down to licensing ('why should we license your show for our territory when people are already watching it online?'), advertising ('why should I buy advertising on this show when people watching it could be anywhere in the world? I want to target my ad buys to people who can actually use my service/product.') and other funding (BBC productions being funded by UK license fees, for instance).

I'd agree that the backwards compatibility has been a huge factor in their dominance, especially in enterprise installs. But I would also say that the same backwards compatibility has been a curse as well as a blessing in some ways.

A blessing, in that you could with a reasonable degree of certitude run custom in-house apps dating from the Win 3.1 era on later versions of the OS. This meant companies were free to upgrade to later versions of Windows without having to rewrite all their in-house code. This meant they'd stick with Windows; if you have to rewrite your code for a newer OS, you're free to examine other options ("Would Linux serve us better? A Mac? Sun boxes?") you would not otherwise look into. By ensuring the enterprise users didn't have to do that, Microsoft kept them on Windows.

But this is also a curse, however, inasmuch as they now have to maintain that backwards compatibility or risk losing that same market. And that means you have to strike a careful balance; improve your security model, remove old and insecure APIs (or change them to be more secure) and you run the risk of breaking all of that software. Microsoft wants/needs to move forward, modernize the OS. But in order to do so, they likely will break older things. When even /rumors/ of incompatibility with Vista hit, you notice many companies didn't bother to test whether or not their stuff would run. They simply assumed that it would not, and did not upgrade.

So the backwards compatibility that helped them capture and hold the desktop market is *also* what drags them down a bit and prevents them from moving forward as much as they would like.

I think in some ways this makes the biggest competitor to Vista (and presumably Windows 7) not Mac OS X or Linux, but Windows XP. Simply because of that same 'backwards compatibility is important to the market' factor.

That's my $0.02 + state sales tax, anyway.

Well, if you want to paint broad generalizations about computer users... Mac users are *also* mature enough to post under their own handles, and to own up when they were sleepily posting incorrect information and admit they were wrong. ;)

Actually, you're right; this is why I shouldn't post before coffee. It was a VM, not an emulator. There are still *emulated* options. My apologies for the erroneous post.

Classic wasn't precisely a VM in the normal sense, though, but rather more of an abstraction layer. Most PowerPC code was just run native and unchanged, and there was simply an abstraction layer that turned all the classic system calls (and some old hardware calls, admittedly) into modern equivalents.

The benefit of which was that you did not take nearly the performance hit you would for virtualizing the entire computer a'la a traditional VM, but the downside was that Classic would no longer work once Macs made the switch to Intel architectures because you weren't virtualizing hardware at all, just abstracting the system APIs into newer calls.

Which is why Classic is no longer in Mac OS X as of Leopard, now that all newer Macs are Intel-based. There's still true VM based equivalents for Intel machines, though, like Sheepshaver.

Except Boxee didn't strip the commercials from Hulu. I used to watch Hulu in the browser in the beta days, and then later in Boxee. I saw the same ads inlaid in the show whether I watched on the site or via Boxee. The difference was that Boxee had better UI for browsing the programs, and that Boxee's method of reading the stream gave me considerably better framerate/performance than trying to view full-screen in Flash on the site did.

In other words, Boxee was a great deal more usable for me as a viewer, and I saw all the same commercials I did as a user of the website. (Hulu doesn't do sidebar advertising, their adverts are in the programs themselves where ad-breaks would normally be.)

It wasn't just 'not in the fine print,' as I recall. When I switched to the Silverlight viewer (to be able to use Netflix instant streaming on the Mac), I seem to vaguely remember the warning being in large, bold print about two point-sizes larger than the rest of the page.

Except the PS2 was like this as well. (Albeit to a lesser degree.) Until later in the life-cycle, no one had really fully figured out what you could fully do with the hardware.

Speaking as someone who actually did work a bit on coding for the PS2 at a past job, my understanding is not that they /deliberately/ made the console difficult, but that they poured technology into the console without regard for saying 'this piece must be used in this way.' As such, people figured out their own paths (and innovated what was done on the platform).

In some ways, it's a valid strategy. PS2 games unquestionably got more advanced as people explored what they could do with the console's capabilities. (Granted, this understanding comes from other developers at the PS2 training seminar I went to, not officially from Sony themselves.)

Since different companies came up with different techniques (probably including some Sony didn't expect), there was some real variety in the games as well. But the PS2 was also the dominant console, hands down, and so developers were targeting that as their primary platform; they had the freedom to get into exploring the edges of the hardware and figuring out what they could do with future projects.

I suspect the same philosophy applies here. Not so much 'let's make it hard,' but 'let's put lots of power in this thing, and not provide guidance on any particular best way to use it all.' There's a sort of hacker beauty to 'there's no One Right Way, find your own.'

The issue this time around, of course, is that the Xbox 360 is 'good enough' for most gamers; even if the PS3 is more advanced, the 360 is a perfectly workable gaming platform and quite popular. Most major games need to release on both platforms, and so developers are generally not trying to innovate on the PS3 but just trying to take the same game and shoehorn it more or less equally onto both. And so the PS3's untapped potential becomes less a cool puzzle to figure out ('hey, look what I realized we can do!') and more of a higher bar to entry.

Apple makes a little plastic box, sells the boxes and licenses the software. People modify the software to allow you to write to the 'secured' portions of the device storage, thus allowing third-party software to be installed and device functionality to be modified. Apple turns a blind eye.

Jailbreaking folks come up with a way to unlock the radio baseband, making it possible to use a SIM card from any provider in the phone. Cellular companies who want exclusivity complain when phones are unlocked to work on any network. Apple complies with the cell companies' demands and makes changes to prevent unlocking. Apple continues to turn a blind eye to the jailbreaking itself, though does warn folks that if you modify the software they can't be responsible for supporting the modified OS.

Apple releases a new version of the OS containing a locked-down sandbox for third-party apps, allowing people to install apps without jailbreaking. People continue to jailbreak the phones to use private APIs (allowing tethering) or do things like have apps that run in the background and so on. Apple continues to turn a blind eye, and apps exist in both realms.

Someone in the jailbreaking community comes out with a way to basically point-and-click 'crack' software bought from the App Store, and allow people to send it around freely for jailbroken devices. Some app authors find up to 2/3rds (especially for games) of their users are using pirated copies that weren't paid for. Much fuss and to-do on blogs, news sites, etc. App authors complain to Apple that there needs to be Something Done! Oh noes!

Apple, after a year and a half of turning a blind eye to the jailbreaking scene, suddenly makes an abrupt about-face and says 'Jailbreaking is verboten.'

Now, none of us are in the heads of the Apple folks behind this decision, so we can't say for certain whether the sudden shift is due to the EFF's claims, or Crackulous, or maybe just random whim or signs read in tea leaves in the Apple cafeteria. But the timing and sudden nature of Apple's shift here does make a connection to the Crackulous brouhaha at the least a strong possibility.

This is a key point, unfortunately. The people who actually have a full grasp of all the complexities of any situation are generally those who have some involvement -- present or past -- in the situation. If you eliminate anyone with ties to a given sector, then all you have left are 'armchair experts,' who have little practical experience.

The issue is how to balance these factors.