iPhone 4 is a platform, competing smartphones are mere products

It wasn’t just the rollout of the iPhone 4 itself today that propelled the iPhone platform so far ahead of competing smartphone platforms that geek pundits won’t even be able to pretend they’re in the same ballpark. iPhone 4G is an exciting new model likely to see existing iPhone users upgrading in quantity as well as longtime holdouts finally taking the plunge. But it’s not just the new hardware which puts the iPhone platform in a league of its own. Nor is it, for that matter, merely the new iPhone OS 4, ahem, iOS 4 operating system. Nor is it merely the fact that iPhone users can now shoot HD video and edit it right on their device via the new five dollar iMovie app. Today’s additions to the iPhone platform are all strong steps forward, but what makes the platform stand alone is the fact that it is in fact a platform.

While geeks rail about the iPhone not being “open” enough (despite the fact that nearly all third party apps are approved) and instead attempt to play up competing products like the Android or the EVO or whatever other hardware creation may have geeks salivating the most from one minute to the next, those other smartphones are mere products. They may be attempting to become platforms with the launch of their own app stores and such, but it’s the mere fact that those products are so disjointed as a result of being geek-oriented and even geek-controlled which will keep them from ever becoming coherent platforms in their own right; the geeks will simply never allow it to happen. As long as smartphones like the Android are designed with the geek in mind, complete with the ability to hack the device for sport or to install an app that the geek’s drunken geek neighbor wrote in BASIC the night before, and as long as that geek “openness” (the rest of us would call it “anarchy”) remains the primary goal of those smartphone products, they’ll forever remain mere products and never develop into actual mainstream platforms. BlackBerry has had eight years to try, and never has and never will. Android, despite being available on all the popular carriers the iPhone isn’t, is still getting its ass kicked by the iPhone in marketshare by a margin of more than three to one.

Hardware specs are important, and the new iPhone 4 leads the pack when it comes to hardware specs that are important to the mainstream while wisely ignoring the hardware aspects that only geeks would care about anyway. But what keeps the mainstream flocking to the iPhone, and what the geeks will never understand, is the fact that the iPhone is a coherent platform from top to bottom while competing smartphones are mere collections of specs and features.