We have the iPhone and they don't

Every time I see one of those silly Verizon "map" commercials and then AT&T's hapless attempts at a counter punch I wonder what must be going through their minds. You gotta give Verizon credit for dreaming up the clever albeit obnoxious "There's a map for that" spots aping off Apple's crisp and clean "There's an app for that" commercials, and how they then exploited what's really nothing more than differences in wireless services technical nomenclature into making it look like AT&T had practically no coverage at all in the USA. I mean, all AT&T has to do is say "We have the iPhone. Verizon doesn't." For that's really what it all boils down to. (And, oh, why in the universe did they ever ditch "Cingular" for AT&T???)

The extent to which the iPhone revolutionized almost everything is stunning. After dissing touch screens and tablets for 20 years, everyone's now falling all over themselves proclaiming touch the next big thing, adding touch everywhere, and, of course, bringing out "iPhone killers." If it only were that easy. I swear, it's hard not to be jaded when yet another vendor proclaims that the addition of multi-touch has somehow elevated its products into the upper stratosphere of usefulness, or not to yawn when there's yet another  glossy, shiny iPhone copy that beats the iPhone in this irrelevant spec or that. Over the past three years I've reviewed dozens of products that all claimed to surpass the iPhone. Few made it past a flashy announcement, fewer even eked out any degree of commercial success, none came close to posing even a remote challenge to the iPhone. Heck, even mighty Google laid an egg with the competent but unexceptional Nexus (and gave us what some of the tech press called the "world's worst customer support" in the process).

So why is the iPhone this invulnerable to attacks? After all, whatever technology Apple uses is available to everyone else as well. It looks great, of course, but the magic is in the way it works. And even there, it's hardly magic. It's just icons that look good, scrolling that "feels" right, reaction to tapping and pinching that is always instantaneous, complete consistency, and the iPhone never lets you see it sweat (like with nasty crashes into some sort of console mode, blue screens of death and assorted other uglies). This is where Apple gets it and the rest of the world doesn't. It's like the Japanese automaker got it when it came to making buttons and controls that felt silky-smooth and worked just right and Detroit, with its balky stalks and cheap plastics, didn't.   

So for now, the rest of the world is in catchup mode. Adding multi-touch to Windows and every appliance under the sun just because it's really hot and it works just like the iPhone makes zero sense to me. HP bragging they're having decades of touch experience? Yes, at some point at the dawn of PCs they had desktops with a touch bar on the CRT that were a dismal failure. And talk about gambling away the technology and brand equity of the Compaq iPaq! And I've yet to come across a single Windows product where multi-touch works even fraction as well as on the iPhone. So why bother with all the me-too copying?

Apple won't always get it right and they won't always stay ahead. As is, whether or not it's true, people believe the magic is all Steve Jobs', and Steve won't last forever. So let's enjoy it all while we can. The iPhone is indeed insanely great.