The dedicated button just never made much sense to me over having a button in the app UI when it was needed.
How many iPhone apps do not have some sort of settings button? And how much screen real estate does that button waste?
it seems Google has gotten over fearing Apple patents by implementing their own multitouch now.
Other companies had multitouch before Apple did. Microsoft Surface predates the iPhone by a few months. I know Apple got their multitouch technology by acquiring FingerWorks, though. I don't know how old their patents might be. But Apple is/has been sued by another company for itself violating multitouch patents.
Patents can be licensed after all.
Unlikely when you're wanting to use it in an open source application, especially when its license allows for commercial use.
On Android, it's got UI zoom buttons, as if they carried over that feature from the web interface. I know it ties into the multitouch situation, but it's one of those situations where Google used an older UI method to get around it instead of coming up with a new touch method.
Android doesn't even require a touch interface, much less a multitouch interface. Given, most Android devices these days do have a touch interface, but there is no requirement that they do.
It's one of those things that does come down to opinion. Minimalist vs flexibility. The iPhone OS definitely went with the minimalist approach, starting from scratch and adding only what is absolutely necessary. Android and the phones built around it come from more of a traditional design model that tries to fit everyones different use cases, adding potential unneeded complexity.
I understand your point, and it may be a good reason why the iPhone does so well. Any idiot can use it. I don't want to be limited to the proverbial lowest common denominator, though.
Over the years, I've come to appreciate the Apple method quite a bit
You may have intended this as part of "the Apple method", but they have control over the entire iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad/iPhoneOS gamut, and that's the way they want it. That's fine, and does provide for tight integration between hardware and software. But Google is explicitly avoiding that. They may have a reference platform of some nature, but their intention is for Android to be able to run everywhere.
The iPad starts from near scratch, and builds up to try and make a touch device work well, while sacrificing flexibility
And that approach probably makes sense for those people for whom the web, or even just Facebook, is the entirety of the internet. I guess my general problem with it is that it's little more than a web appliance that happens to be extensible. At least Amazon is up front about the fact that the Kindle is an ebook reader, that maybe might be able to do a few other things.
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