Originally Posted by rc46:
Rubinstein is on record saying how much he despises the thin slab form factor and argued with Jobs for months saying the iphone needed a keyboard. I completely agree with him. It feels terrible in your pocket, terrible in your hand and is very uncomfortable to hold next to your face. Palm would be fools to make a iphone clone. They need to keep thinking out of the box and not copying sub-par devices. BTW, not having a removable battery would be complete suicide. Instead of 64mb they should stay with 8 and add micro SD expansion. This would be very popular.
If you go to the sprint store today you will see that more the half the phones there are already the iphone form factor so if "many" are still waiting, I'm not sure why?
Rubinstein left Apple long before the iPhone. I don't think he had anything to do with it at all. There are articles from years earlier where he is quoted as being completely against an "iPod phone", but that's about it. Obviously, if he was against the idea of what became the iPhone, he has been proven wrong.
I do have to question your thoughts on removable battery, keyboard, and memory. If Apple has shown anything, it's that there are major benefits to a non-removable battery, the pluses of a software keyboard at least offset many of the minuses, and that having a lot of onboard memory is the way to go (especially when people start putting gigabytes of apps on their devices). You definitely have valid opinions, but the tens of millions of iPhone customers sort of proves Apple's point. Some people do want hard keyboard and removable battery/memory options, but masses of customers have embraced the complete opposite approach.
One thing webOS (until it's fixed) and Android (may never be fixed anytime soon) are going to get hammered on is the small partition available for app storage. That was a suicidal decision. Some of the best iPhone games are already larger, by themselves, than the entire 256MB app space on Android!