Ideapad

From my post on aiaio:

In partnering with HTC, a company that produces cell phones for every US carrier and two different operating systems, Google ceded control of the overall experience. Never mind that the handset is slim and fairly attractive. It's also generic, and apparently imperfect. When David Pogue pushes your phone's home button, you really don't want it to fail.

There's a huge difference between designing and engineering a device, as Apple did with the iPhone and Palm with the Pre, and a company having a device "built to its specifications". Google was telling HTC, "We want our phone to do this," and HTC was putting the requisite componentry in place. This tends to minimize holistic product definition and by its very nature waters down the innovation. In contrast, Palm and Apple (and Motorola and Nokia, for that matter) manage the entire process, and their software is designed to complement the hardware, maximizing user experience. Google, a company that is strictly virtual, doesn't know how to do this.

Apple completely reengineered the UI of mobile telephony with the iPhone. Visual voice mail. Screen-based keyboard. Multi-touch interface. The list goes on and on. Google, in contrast, is very "me too" at this point in its phone development cycle. It will be interesting to see if Google follows the Microsoft model and finds nirvana in its third or fourth release.