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Today it occurred to me, Google has taken a play directly from the Microsoft playbook. These days there is a prize fight being fought between Google and Apple for the heart and mind of smart phone users. Apple has a head start, but that doesn’t historically mean a whole lot.

A Brief History Lesson

Back in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. There had been home computers before, but the Macintosh was the first computer that anyone could just sit down and use. Before the Macintosh, computers were obtuse, they required knowledge of arcane commands and were accessed in a, and I am being nice here, less than approachable interface.

Apple came back from Xerox after seeing the mouse and graphical user interface and in perfect Steve Jobs form set out on perfecting it and making it as sexy as possible.

The problem that Apple has never managed to solve is that sexy is expensive. In 1990, 6 years after Apple had released the Macintosh with great success, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that had a true graphical windowed environment and it was the first version of Windows that truly caught on with PC makers.

You can practically thank Windows 3.0 for the birth of several major computer manufacturers, namely Gateway, or Gateway 2000 if you are old enough to remember them then.

What Windows 3.0 managed to do was put a computer in your home, with roughly the same capabilities as a Macintosh, but at almost half of the price. Computers were still very expensive then compared to today. A Macintosh went for about $2,495 and a PC with Windows could be had for less than $1,500.

Isn’t This Article About Phones?

Oh yea, that’s right. So what does this have to do with phones? The Apple pundits will tell you “Price doesn’t mean much, you can get an iPhone on contract for $200 and they are selling light hot cakes. That’s true, but there is quite a long tail on that user acceptance curve and the real wealth of users are not yet holding smart phones.

As of 2010, ComScore says 45.5 million people in the United States own smartphones. The mobile phone market is comprised of 234 million subscribers. That’s just in the United States! That means all of the smartphone OS’s, and Palm, Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM are the biggies, are fighting for less than 20% of the available market. Are these numbers starting to sound familiar?

Today that means 80% of the market aren’t willing to pay for either the phone or the data plan. Google is already trying to figure out ways to subsidize the data plan with advertising, and you can already get Google Android based phones free on contract. This year Best Buy had an Android phone free with contract for every major carrier.

That means we aren’t too far from free Android phones with cheaper data plans. Once Apple has soaked up all of the tech savvy people with expendable income, Google or Microsoft (I hope!) can walk in and just sweep all the remaining people into customers. If you think this sounds crazy, it’s happened before.

It’s like déjà vu over here if you ask me. A “good enough” competitor, prices that attract the consumer at large, and a willingness to let anyone build on their platform to build devices that fit whatever the user wants.

I don’t know about you, but if I was Apple, I’d be looking in the rearview mirror. And in case you think the iPad is any different, read this article again and replace iPhone with iPad in your mind.

It’s been about a month since my wife and I ditched our HTC Mogul Windows Mobile smart phones and their super cheap MS discounted service plans. We switched from Sprint to AT&T and went with the ever popular iPhone.

It wasn’t until two or three days later that we realized what a leap we had made in capability and reliability. I have to be honest and and timidly say that I went away from my Employer, Microsoft, and Windows Mobile in favor of a competitor. I had a lot of problems with Windows Mobile. A lot of that can be blamed on the hardware, but blame lies with the software as well. Windows Mobile is not the most stable smart phone OS in the world. I sincerely hope that 6.5 and 7 eventually smooth out and fill the gaps. When that time comes, I’ll consider switching back. Until then, I have to say that the impact of the iPhone may only just now catching steam.

I have yet to have a person pick it up and not covet the sexy little device. Beyond the sleek case and funky apps, just what is it that makes the iPhone so damned good?

Rock Solid Operating System

So far, the iPhone has been incredibly stable. With the wealth of first and 3rd party apps, it’s amazing that it works as well as it does. I have about 3 pages of apps loaded on it and I would say that quite a few of them I have already grown dependant on. The phone is not an afterthought, it’s integrated into the package and when you stop to think that no matter what else it does, it’s a phone, it should do that exceptionally well.

I think that this fact may be the genesis of the problems with Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile extended a PDA OS to also work as a phone. In other words the phone is merely an application on a device meant to manage contacts and keep up with your appointments. The core of the OS still maintains those roots.

Solid Ecosystem

We all know about the app store, but that’s just the icing on the cake. iPhone accessories and iTunes’ music and video store only extend the capabilities of an already amazing device. You can pretty much do anything with it.

Best Browser in the Market

Let’s face it. With most sites not truly catering to mobile devices, you need a device that can competently render a regular website. While there are a few dings in the iPhone armor, like flash, it’s light-years beyond the competition in this area.

Can the iPhone be Beaten?

I think so. Microsoft, Google and RIM sure as hell hope so. In order to accomplish this the charter should be pretty simple:

Start Over.

I am pretty sure this is Microsoft’s plan with 7, it’s a whole new code base. No backwards compatibility should be expected. Start by making it a kick ass phone. If that means placing some serious requirements on the vendors, then do so. If you want a touch screen interface with only a few buttons for specific tasks, then make it that way and don’t let the vendors extend it with ridiculous options that only make it messy.

Build the ecosystem around Zune, make sure that it’s a no brainer to manage the phone with Windows natively. Don’t make the user go and download and install ActiveSync and a whole bunch of .net packages separately. Make it dead simple.

Last but not least, make it sexy. I don’t mean understated lines like the Zune, I mean so sexy you just can’t live without owning one.

I guarantee the E&D folks at MS and the smart people at Google know all of these things. If you aren’t already using an iPhone, do you intend to? If you are, would you switch to Microsoft or Google to the right device? Sound off….

Let me start by clarifying that this is all in the SDK emulator, so it’s clunky anyway, but I thought I would take a minute to do a comparison for those of you thinking that Google’s new OS might be as revolutionary as the iPhone OS.

In principle, it IS that revolutionary, because it’s open source and anyone, including me, can develop applications for it. (and I am )

But as someone who has become quite comfortable browsing the Internet on my iPod Touch, the Android OS is not quite there. Not saying that it won’t be by the time you buy a device using it, but not right now.

The Android OS has a keyboard shortcut and menu option for zooming in and out of the page. Sure clicking G to zoom out is easy, but it’s not quite as intuitive as pinching on the iPhone. Perhaps for something that will so heavily be used as a browser, having a dedicated hardware rocker for zoom like a digital camera would be a better way to go.

I have seen the video for the Touchscreen version and it had pan like an iPhone, but not the zoom and pinch ease.

Another thing I noticed is it’s slow, and could possibly cause a user to think a page loaded horribly wrong. For some reason it loads the page elements, and then applies the style sheet after the fact. So when loading my page for example, you see the first example, before the second:

And you notice the page had still not completely loaded. Again, these are just initial impressions, but with the loads of hype, I would have thought it was a bit more polished being that there is already a complete SDK and even an eclipse plug in for developers.