My respect and admiration for Apple has steadily declined over the past year with notable low points being the iPad announcement on 27th January this year and Apple’s announcement to sue HTC earlier this week.

Being an optimist I was hoping for a OSX tablet when rumours about the tablet device first circulated. Alas, we got a bigger iPod Touch with a book store and were told this was revolutionary? Total nonsense – to use the words from the character William Parrish in Meet Joe Black there was “not an ounce of excitement, not a whisper of a thrill” the most impressive thing was the battery life and that they decided to charge a fair price.

The iPhone was a revolutionary product but for me it’s starting to feel a little stagnant. I have an iPhone 3G and love the touch-screen interface but hate the Apple walled garden, the missing features (like SMS Delivery Reports, Bluetooth File Transfer and other Bluetooth Profiles), battery life issues and lack of customisations – the later notably sharing a similar idealogy to the Model T Ford perhaps:

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”
- Henry Ford

Jailbreaking it relieves some of these issues but why should I have to void my warranty and hack my phone to get it to do some things which have been round for years on the majority of other phones? I did know what I was getting into when I bought it but at that time there was no competition in the market. Now the competition has caught up (with say the Google Nexus One or HTC Desire) it’s becoming more exciting and this will surely help to drive innovation further which is great news for people like me who want a fully functional smartphone with an intuitive touch-screen UI in the palm of their hands.

John Gruber concludes in his article:

“What worries me is the idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company’s interests. I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.”
- John Gruber

I agree. Apple need to do what they do best and concentrate on making their innovative products better rather than putting their money and resources in unnecessary lawsuits which bully the competition and effectively stiffle innovation. If they don’t they or at least their image could end up in the compost heap slowly rotting away…

My next phone certainly won’t be an iPhone – it’ll be an Android.

I’m quite impressed with the HTC Desire…