This reminds me of a discussion we had once or twice at Rio. We found, or possibly even did, some market research that said that people choose gadgets more often on their industrial design than on their software features. (This was for MP3 players, of course, but I can believe it's similar for phones.) So why, the devil's advocate in me said, do we have ten times as many people working on new software features as we do on new industrial designs, and not the other way round? If you look at Nokia, who before the Iphone came along were the "default" phone maker in the UK, their current range is literally dozens of phones, with probably only four or five different software builds (not platforms) among the lot of them, and in the past probably as few as one or two builds.

Peter