The iPhone ecosystem will be hard for Android to reproduce. It goes beyond marketing communication. What about books for end users? The Genius Bar, comprehensiv

The iPhone ecosystem will be hard for Android to reproduce. It goes beyond marketing communication. What about books for end users? The Genius Bar, comprehensive self-help materials online, your friends who all have the same phone? Desktop contact and calendar sync? The iTunes music and app stores? All these ecosystem components require a critical mass of customers to make them practical. This will be hard to achieve when the customers are spread out over dozens of devices that are all a little bit different. Even if Android never catches up with iPhone in popularity and ecosystem quality, it could still be worth developing for. Marvell's Sehat Sutardja, quoted in the article, points out, "There could be two billion smartphones. The proprietary operating systems could have one billion phones. That means half of the phones will be open source." And I would certainly rather have my washing machine running Android than Windows CE.