>"My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a

>"My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a standard phone when other companies will do it for you." Sure, companies have tried to build their own OS. They absolutely sucked. I suspect that Google understood what it took to build a mobile OS that enabled easier search. And they got so fed up by the horrid interfaces of the OEMs (seriously, remember how terrible every single one of them was?) that they jumpstarted the process. Better mobile OS = better adoption, more searched per handset. More revenue. You can either try to take a bigger piece of the pie, or make the pie bigger. Google's strategy is to make the pie bigger (and with their top of mind branding, they also get the biggest slice). Combine that with the phone manufacturers' stunning incompetence in building a decent interface, and you have the perfect situation for google to build android. The less generous side of me also realizes that google understood that the OS developer had great control over the handsets (defaults are a very powerful force). And if a competitor (say, Nokia) were to get huge adoption of a phone OS, they would naturally be drawn to build their own ad system. Just look at how Apple did with the iOS apps.