On Apple’s earnings call last night Apple CEO Steve Jobs, above, took the opportunity to take a pop at what he calls the fragmentation of Google’s Android operating system. Quite why he saw the need to attack competitors when Apple itself had its first $20bn quarter and saw revenue up 67%, only Jobs knows. He may make a nifty gadget or two, but his business sense looks less and less reliable.
Anyhow Steve Jobs said of Android: "Twitter client [TweetDeck] recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge."
To which the TweetDeck CEO fired back via Twitter: "Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t." Take that Steve Jobs!
Jobs also scotched rumours the firm is working on a 7 inch tablet version of its iFad tablet computer, saying that the 7 inch rivals are a bunch of muppets who haven’t got a clue about design.
Sadly his argument was characteristically muddled and his PR team must have been weeping into their coffee when he said of 7 inch tablets (3 inches smaller diagonally than the iPad): "It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple’s done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them."
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Which begs the question, if you can’t interact with applications on a 7 inch screen, how the hell can you interact with them on a darned smartphone, sales of which helped Apple to its $20bn quarter? Or as the Tweetdeck CEO might say, "Errr, what about the iPhone, which has half the screen size of a 7 inch tablet, yet happily supports 300,000 applications?"
Doh!
