WRONG: I read Engadget everyday. Obviously you dont more like. They dont go round praising it either. They dont slate it but its not a full on praise. They still go and talk about what it lacks. Then you get the comments sections, which are full of iPhone hate.
It's the smell of fear.
None of the others have anything close to Apple's unified software ecosystem and competence in UI design. The closest will probably be Google's platform, but that isn't on the market yet.
So you'll find that most of the criticisms will be about hardware or counting novelty features rather than looking at the device as a unified whole, and not realizing that sometimes less is more. The Luddites defending physical keyboards are the same sort of people who used to defend the command line over the graphical user interface. How many people would buy a computer without a GUI these days?
Indeed, people who are old enough will recognize the responses as similar to those that greeted the original Mac.
There is no iPhone killer. The iPhone is a game changing device. The people who complain that it doesn't play the old game well enough are missing the point. Again, I'd ask someone to show me a phone that has what the iPhone has. A next gen multi touch interface, a mature and secure OS, a central and trusted (and wildly popular) repository for purchasing media and applications, and massive developer mindshare.
Jobs was right. Mobile phone software is juvenile. It's awful. Even on a platform like Windows Mobile, a developer can't assume a common physical UI. If you develop for the iPhone, you know exactly how it is going to work on every iPhone. It's much more like developing for the PC, where you can assume keyboard and mouse input and a bitmap screen. Mobile phones have various input methods and a plethora of buttons. Many don't even have touchscreens. There's not enough standardization.
What can the others do? Samsung et al. will have no trouble putting out decent hardware. But where are they going to get the software from? Microsoft? Windows Mobile is justly reviled. Google? Perhaps, but Google doesn't have a mature OS, and doesn't have much experience with portable multimedia or hardware. Apple on the other hand has a gold mine of intellectual property from 30 years in the computer business (hardware and software) and half a decade of successfully selling bits for a buck a pop over the internet.
The future of the mobile device business favours companies that can build the whole widget, both the hardware and software and the cloud services. Apple is one of the few companies that can actually do that all in house.
