OSNews

That combination sold me on my HTC Desire.

Yup!

When I first saw iPhone, I thought it looks nice. But once I knew it lacks a lot features, I wonder why anyone would buy this crap. I was wrong

Good marketing can sell. If you can't make it good, make it look good!

And in the case of the iPhone and iPad, they are good.

You only need to use an Android phone (I use an Epic 4G) for a few days to notice that it isn't nearly as smooth as an iPhone.

And the less said about Android tablets the better.

*Blablabla*
As an owner of a Symbian phone, I give a sh***t on features like multitasking, cut & paste, MMS, etc. when the usability of said features is more than laking.

E. g. somebody mentioned that Nokias N95 went unnoticed because of a lake of marketing. Sorry, the N95 went unnoticed because it was a typical tech fetishist's product: A long list of features without any thought about usability. The N95 was a typical dinosaur device: Like dinosaurs growing bigger and bigger with the same brain until the reach the end of the flagpole, the N series packed more and more hardware into the device without any thoughts about developing the OS.

People tend to forget that some of Apple's innovation lie in the parts Apple did willfully omit e. g. no stylus and no physical keyboard input. Despite most 'smartphone users' that were fixated on this (thus all the comments at the beginning of the iPhone era about how Apple will fail miserably without such hardware input), Apple succeeded by providing a usable alternative to those means of input.

Apple's strategy was the right one: What they did provide was done right. They focused on certain features building a usable 'base device', delivering other features with updates when they were done. Now have a look at what Nokia does ..

Apple's "innovation" doesn't lie in what they omit. The touchscreen is just a different input device, not even necessarily a better one. Better for web browsing, worse for almost everything else. Apple's "innovation" was never about omitting MMS, cut & paste or multitasking, they simply couldn't deliver at the time.

Of course, they needed the same people who queued up for the first gen iPhone to queue up for the 3G version next year, so in that sense their innovation lie in what they omit. They're very good at using their fan base for marketing, so making a first generation product with glaring flaws to go along with the bling is an excellent way to get to sell the same product twice.