How iPhone Beats Android in OS Battle: Steve Jobs Counts the Ways

by Clint Boulton

Jobs ignited the fire by digging at the Android device activation count Schmidt frequently tosses around. There are 200,000 Android devices turned on daily.

Apple is now up to 275,000 iOS devices, spanning iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. That’s up from 230,000 activations in June. Apple’s App Store sports 300,000 apps to 90,000 in the Android Market.

While Jobs acknowledged that Android handset units surpassed iPhone units shipped for the June quarter, he was confident that Apple, with 14.1 million units shipped in the last quarter, whipped Android. “Gartner reported that about 10 million Android phones were shipped in the June quarter, and we await to see if iPhone or Android was the winner in this most recent quarter,” Jobs said. Check out Gartner’s latest market share count.

HTC Sense and Motorola Motoblur are proprietary user interfaces the companies use to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience, Jobs said. As a result, the user is tested in trying to learn how to use them, Jobs notes. With the iPhone, the UI is constant.

Jobs singled out TweetDeck, noting that its Twitter client had to deal with more than a hundred different versions of Android on 244 different handsets, presenting “developers with a daunting challenge.” However, TweetDeck’s Iain Dodsworth denied this was a problem.

Android is so fragmented from being “open” that Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone have all announced they are creating their own app stores for Android. This is a valid point, but it might actually be a good thing considering Android Market offers sub-par support and billing infrastructure. Still, Jobs argued: “Apple’s App Store has over three times as many apps as Google’s marketplace, and offers developers one-stop shopping to get their apps to market easily, and get paid swiftly.”

Jobs pointed to Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure” music strategy, which separated software components from the hardware components, as a major failure. Microsoft would launch its Zune integrated music player and Google would try its hand with the Nexus One, which also failed.

“We see tremendous value at having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator,” Jobs said. “We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s; when selling [to] the users who want their devices to just work, we believe that integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

Jobs saved some invective for tablets other than his Apple iPad, noting that gadgets such as the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab sport a 7-inch screen. Jobs noted: “One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45 percent as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen.”

Jobs: “If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view, and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion.” Guess that answers the question of whether Apple will build a 7-inch iPad.