To date, Android has yet to demonstrate any ability to lure customers away from the iPhone. All of Android’s growth has been at the expense of Microsoft, Symbian, and RIM. The big recent quarter that everyone likes to talk about where Android “outsold the iPhone” was the quarter just BEFORE Apple released the iPhone 4, and even in that quarter, Android just BARELY outsold the iPhone, despite several new models on all four carriers being made available during that quarter.

The only two things holding Apple back from growing even faster than it already has is exclusivity to one carrier in many parts of the world and the inability to make the iPhone 4 fast enough. Once the manufacturing speed catches up to demand, and once we see the iPhone on other carriers (yes, even Verizon eventually), Android will hit the wall, in terms of how much faster it can grow. it will run out of easy prey and have to start making gains on merit.

Anyone can take a sale from Windows mobile at this point. That’s no reason to cook up delusions of grandeur.

Momentum is a good thing. But for the long term, killing the iPhone will be a lot harder than a lot of people think. With the iPad having no competition at all, more and more people are going to be investing in the iOS app garden. And once they’re in there, it’s not going to be easy to get them back out.

Alternately, you can think of it as a “small tablet”, in which case it’s more expensive than the cheapest iPad (unless you want to be roped into a two-year contract), with a much smaller screen and not nearly as much choice in high-quality applications.

Oh, and the 3G provider is AT&T.

Exactly who is going to buy this thing? What phone user wouldn’t rather have a Droid X on Verizon, and what tablet user wouldn’t rather have an iPad? Or better yet, a much cheaper iPod Touch?

Apple is going to have a very good holiday quarter this year. They literally have no competition for the iPad, despite all those devices that were demoed at CES BEFORE the iPad was even announced. They sent every other tech company back to the drawing board, and none of them has come up with anything yet.

It astounds me that Dell doesn’t realize that the current iPhone and iPad form factors were carefully chosen for a reason. Something in between like the Streak is good for neither tablet computing nor phone use.

And after all this work and research, expert QWERTY typists STILL couldn’t type as fast as I can on a software keyboard? What does that say for the 90% of us who aren’t experts? Can you imagine hunting and pecking on this thing?

At what point do we all just admit that Apple was right, that a physical keyboard on a mobile device is a relic, an old idea beyond which we’ve already moved?

And the biggest issue with this input method, of course, is that it’s completely unusable with one hand. If there’s one thing that Jeff Hawkins from Palm taught us years ago, it’s that any mobile that can’t be used at least in some capacity with a single hand is pretty much a failure. So there’s no way this keyboard would work on a phone of any kind. On a tablet, maybe. But not a phone.

The next big thing in text input will not be just a revamping of the old QWERTY keyboard. No one has figured it out yet, but there’s something much better out there. There has to be.

I agree very strongly with Martin when he says that compatibility issues don’t really exist the way they used to, as well. Email, text documents, photos, music, video: Most of these file formats are predominantly open standards now. So there’s little reason to feel that you NEED to have an Android or an iOS device. You could switch back and forth with minimal fuss. And if work mandates one platform, but you use another at home, no big deal.

I think Android has proven that it’s here to stay. Whether or not Google can turn Android into a profitable business for its software developers, or whether or not it even cares about that, is yet to be seen. I have a hard time believing that Android can take a serious chunk of market share away from Apple without a MAJOR turnaround in the quality of available apps. (Notice, to date, all of Google’s growth has been at the expense of Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, etc. Platforms with even crappier available software—Apple is still growing market share.) My hunch is that Google isn’t supporting app development in any meaningful way because it would rather see all apps go to the cloud, the only place where Google ever makes money on ads. But I’ve been hearing that all computing is headed to the browser for almost a decade now, and it hasn’t happened yet.

Without any really good apps (talking quality, not quantity here), Google is going to have a tremendously hard time getting people to give up the iPhone in favor of Android. And until that happens, you can’t dominate the market. Remember, the Zune did a great job of killing a lot of lesser music players; but it never put a dent in Apple’s sales. So far, that’s a closer comparison to iOS and Android than Mac and PC.