Jobs pokes RIM over software, Google over fragmentation, but admires Nokia for great $50 phones

Basking in the afterglow of Apple's massive revenue and profit Q4 figures, CEO Steve Jobs took time out to give his views on the smartphone market.

First up, he dove into RIM, pointing out how the 14.1 million iPhones sold in the quarter bested the 12.1 million BlackBerries shipped by RIM.

"We've now passed RIM, and I don't see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future," he stated.

"They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.

"I think it's going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform after iOS and Android.

"With 300,000 apps on the App Store, RIM has a high mountain to climb."

Things got more feisty when Jobs' gaze shifted to Google.

"Android is our biggest competitor. They outshipped us in the June quarter as we were transitioning to iPhone 4. I imagine we will be competing with them for quite some time," Jobs said.

However with Google reiterating its 200,000 Android devices activations per day, he pointed out Apple was now ahead.

"For comparison, Apple has activated around 275,000 iOS devices per day on average for the past 30 days with a peak of almost 300,000 iOS devices on a few of those days," he revealed.

"We await to see whether Apple or Google was the winner in this most recent quarter."

More philosophical were his musings about the differences between open and closed platforms.

"Google loves to characterise Android as an open platform," Jobs said. "We find it disingenuous to call Android open and iOS closed. We think it's a smokescreen. It clouds the real difference."

According to Jobs, this is that all iOS devices work the same, while Android has become very fragmented, with OEMs such as Motorola and HTC installing proprietary UI to differentiate their Android phones from cheaper examples.

"The developers of TweetDeck had to deal with 100 different versions of Android on 244 handsets," he pointed out.

"Android is a daunting challenge for developers."

Similarly, the likes of Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone creating their own Android app stores will make the overall experience less easy for consumers and developers.

"We are very committed to our integrated approach and are confident it will triumph over Google's approach," Jobs predicted.

Yet, surprisingly perhaps, there were kind words for Nokia; albeit that with a tiny fraction of the US market, the Finnish OEM is hardly a direct competitor to Apple.

"Our goal is to make the best devices in the world," Jobs said.

"It's not to be the biggest. Nokia is the biggest and we admire them for being able to ship the number of handsets they do, but we don't aspire to be like them.

"We don't know how to make great $50 handsets. We want to be like us."

[source: Apple]