A conversation I have every month or so. Fellow iPhone users, this is our pickle.

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Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) on the iPad backlash, penned before the Apple press conference:

Because there is going to be one, trust me. This device isn’t as obvious as iPhone. It’s kind of subtle. Which means that those of you who have done the spiritual work to prepare for it will be fine, but those who haven’t done the work, well, they’re probably going to miss a lot of this at first. So you’ll see some noise about who needs this thing, it’s just a fancy desk ornament, and so on. I am telling you this now so that you can be ready for the harsh voices and they won’t hurt you when you hear them. Just let the negativity pass by you. Do not engage with it or try to fight it or argue with it. Step aside, and let the dark energy flow away.

Humor put briefly aside, my casual observation of blogs, forums and Twitter suggests the hating on this thing is unbelievable.  I see two camps emerging: one that gets it, one that doesn't.  At this point, the former seems considerably smaller than the latter.

Oh, but before we get started, there's also this: MS shill Paul Thurrott already pronouncing the iPad a failure.  Which he did before the keynote was even over. I needed to get that out of my system right from the get go.  John Gruber, be sure to file that one away for your early 2011 Best of Claim Chowder post.

So, moving along, I'll never quite be able to digest the hyper-reactionism and knee-jerk judgementalist attitudes of the Apple fanbase.  It doesn't matter if Cupertino releases the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad: if the device right out of the box isn't saving puppies and importing Russian brides automatically for lonely geeks, it's called underwhelming.  Today's backlash against the iPad reminds me of Slashdot's now-famous October 2001 reaction to the first-gen iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

The iPad does most everything mainstream users want: email. Web. Gaming. Photos. Video. Books. Music. Not to mention the idea that you get to buy into an established software ecosystem of nearly all of the apps already sitting in the App Store.  The iPad, via the new iWork, also allows a new way to create content, not just consume it.  And nearly everyone is ignoring the value of the iPad SDK, which will give rise to iPad-tailored apps that will be phenomenal using such a large multitouch surface.  It weighs a pound-and-a-half.  Its battery will do 10 hours of video.

(Quick note regarding the lack of Flash: stop complaining about it.  Flash sucks in many cases, and with YouTube and Vimeo moving some of their videos to HTML5 + h.264, Apple is throwing its considerable weight around in web policy-making. They don't like Flash, and never will.  Deal with it.)

There's even a docking station and mechanical keyboard for the iPad, a peripheral category that Apple has long eschewed as worthy accoutrements for its products.

Reading between the lines, you can tell Apple brass has big plans for the iPad, way, way beyond what most of us (including yours truly) is seeing.  But I'm shocked at the amount of discontent I'm seeing from people who, apparently, needed a front-facing webcam so badly that everything the iPad does is rendered useless without one.  You Skype that much, do you?  Really?  Really?

But it continues: people are calling it 'underpowered' (despite reports to the contrary) and whining about a lack of Verizon support and (inexplicably) calling it nothing more than a 'giant iPod Touch.'  Hard for me to believe that so many people are missing what this thing represents (have they even seen the video?), especially once the other shoe drops.

And that other shoe, of course, is media deals.  With studios. With more publishers.  With magazines and periodicals.  With academic textbook houses.

There's a reason this isn't shipping for 60-90 days, and it's not all because of tight supply chain or violent outbreaks in Chinese factories: it's the ecosystem needs to bake a little more.  If you don't think you're going to see some interesting iPad announcements between now and its commercial release, think again.

I suspect we'll see the same pattern of naysaying, pshawing and predictions of how Win7-based slates or Android tablets or whatever will beat the iPad at its own game.  Until, of course, it starts dominating the market, creating new application classes, and putting competitors in the dirt.  Then everyone will get it.

Palm, RIM, Symbian and Windows Mobile fans: you know what I'm talking about.  Don't you?

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Todd Wasserman, reporting for BrandWeek:

By opting for these tin-eared retorts, AT&T does nothing but set itself up as a foe to consumers. At a conference in New York in early December, CEO Ralph de la Vega responded to charges that AT&T’s iPhone service was slow by turning condescending. “The first thing we need to do is educate consumers about what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega told reporters—this while floating the idea of charging heavy users more than others.

AT&T’s position seems to be that consumers are consuming way more data than the company had expected and everyone just needs to chill until the company can recover from this inconsiderate overuse. When the conceit is that ass-backwards, no amount of spin is effective.

If there's one company whose reputation has been steadily slaughtered over the past two years, it's AT&T.  The malign is deserved: I have followed the blogs, Twitter conversations and press releases as much as the next gadget/tech geek, and to me it's plainly clear that AT&T hasn't learned any lessons from brands who have had their business practices change due to consumers leveraging social channels.

But it's even worse than that.  They view iPhone users as the problem that led to their damaged brand, not their shoddy network to begin with or nearly flat capital expenditures since the iPhone's inception.

As a realtively new AT&T customer (who joined simply because of the iPhone), the vibe I get is that they believe it's easier to milk this iPhone thing -- however long it goes in exclusivity -- for all it's worth than it is to listen to your customers, address negative feedback, and build out your network to accomodate your users happily using your product.  AT&T had a chance to become something special, pehaps even to vy for extentend exclusivity, but instead chose to treat the iPhone deal as a racehorse: flog it as hard as you can until it dies, keep the share price at a decent level, get your bonuses, and move on to what's next.  That sort of myopia will be part of AT&T's enduring legacy, especially when they could have built a race team and made their customers their fans.

When the iPhone opens up to other carriers in the US, AT&T will see a hemhorraging of subscribers like never before.  Given how I drop at least a call day with AT&T, I will likely be among them.

Enjoy your early termination fees, Mr. Stephenson: they're the last vestige of what could have been.

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Tim O'Reilly, reporting just after the Nexus One press event:

News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

As an iPhone user who was impressed with the Motorola Droid but not enough to consider ditching my iPhone for it, the Nexus One already has me thinking that Apple better bring its biggest guns to the 2010 mobile web fight. While Twitter is ablaze about how the Nexus One is the iPhone killer, I think that's premature: anyone who's been doing this a while knows that Apple has had good G2 on this for a while now, and the next version of the iPhone (slated for the now-traditional June/July release) isn't going to concede much to today's Nexus One.

Should be interesting, but all speculation aside, it's time to remember this: when smart companies compete, customers always win. It's a beautiful thing.

(Via @khurtwilliams)

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The new Motorola Droid, probably the most anticipated Android handset to hit the broader market, has a 512 MB ROM embedded onto its motherboard.  Of that, only 256 MB is available for application storage. From AndroidandMe's Taylor Wimberly:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches on November 6, 2009. However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

Google does not support installing apps to the SD card (and likely never will), so developers are limited in what they can create.

This makes no sense to me, and frankly, I'm surprised this handset came to market with this limitation.  No doubt it's a measure to prevent app piracy -- a problem installing apps onto an SD card would surely create -- but this decsion shows a distinct misunderstanding about how an application-rich smartphone could be used.  My old BlackBerry had the same thing, and the onboard memory to run apps got crowded -- fast.

On my iPhone 3GS, I have just over a gig used for 57 apps.  I have a few games that weigh in at over 50 MB each, with one approaching 100 MB.  For a single game.  In light of this, 256 MB for app storage on the Droid seems ludicrous.  Did anyone look at iPhone user/app stats before making a decision not to include more onboard memory, even if it meant the demise of SD support?

The confusing thing is that Motorola gave the Droid a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU -- a strong piece of kit capable of cranking out some impressive graphics.  Did they expect users to have one or two games, and that's it?  Because any graphics-rich game that takes advantage of that chipset is going to weigh in at a fairly hefty size.

The solution is a tough one.  Either allow SD card support for app storage and runtime, or rev the hardware to include more onboard storage.  The former is unlikely to happen because it's a policy-side Pandora's box, and the latter because it's otherworldly expensive.

The more I learn about the Droid, the more I see a rev A effort that shows a ton of promise, but has a long way to go before it can match the iPhone's user experience and platform polish.  Give the iPhone a real network (say, Verizon, sometime, oh, around 3Q next year), and it will own the smartphone market the way Windows owns the desktop.

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