Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business. Ten years ago, a computer was a compu

Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business. Ten years ago, a computer was a computer. For mainstream buyers there was this thing called a Mac but only your brother's kid, who wanted to be a designer, used one and it seemed kind of expensive. Today, the tide is shifting and people expect more and more out of their bit crunchers, whether they're in your pocket or on your desktop. Smartphones, of course, are extra competitive because a lot of manufacturers are duking it out to be the best. Between Apple, HTC and Motorola especially, the bar gets set higher and higher each quarter. Who can jam in the most useful hardware widgets? Who can accomplish the tightest software/hardware integrations so features feel great to use? Whoever it is, they gain a bit more mindshare, a few more sales, a few more solid reviews. And here comes bumbling ol' Dell, treating the smartphone like it's a commodified piece of tech and all they have to do is build it cheap and somewhat good enough. Regardless of whether we're in the mainstream or not, the mainstream isn't stupid. $99 buys you a lot of (subsidized) phone these days -- whether it's an iPhone 3GS or one of the many solid, 2.x Android phones. Either option is just obviously, demonstrably better than Dell's little turd RIGHT THERE IN THE CELL PHONE STORE. Dell took their eye off the ball and they think they can apply the lessons of commodity PCs to smartphones. Just like they did with MP3 players, they will find they're well out of their depth. I think in the end this won't affect Android fragmentation by much for the simple reason that they're not going to sell many of them.