Rob Pegoraro is a technology columnist at The Washington Post. We recently interviewed him on our Motley Fool Money radio show and talked with him about Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) vs. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and got his take on the iPhone's reception problems. Below is an edited transcript of that discussion.
Chris Hill: Now obviously a lot of reports about the reception problems with the latest iPhone. In your mind, does that create an opening for Google and Android or maybe Verizon (NYSE: VZ) or another carrier?
Rob Pegoraro: Verizon seems to think so. They have got some full-page ads for this Droid X SmartPhone they have coming up that make a point of saying it has two antennas so you can hold it however you want. I don't know that it is going to make that much of a difference because the iPhone is tied – handcuffed -- to AT&T (NYSE: T) Wireless and if you haven't heard that AT&T has had trouble keeping up with all the demand created by iPhone users, you might be trying to make a call on an iPhone during peak times in the middle of New York or San Francisco. So people know that you are going to have trouble using the iPhone as a phone. It is a fact and people rationalize that. You do get a lot of great features on an iPhone, some that Androids can't do, some that Android devices do poorly. So I guess this is another trade off to make.
Hill: What is the, in your mind, what is the one thing that people are missing about the iPhone 4? Is it that idea that the phone part of it is actually the least important part of it?
Pegoraro: I don't know. Actually I would agree. This may make me sound like Steve Jobs, but for the numbers I have seen, a lot of people, they do not primarily use their SmartPhones as phones. They are Internet devices. They are email clients, they are text messaging devices, they are iPods, media players. I know the amount of actual phone calls I make on my own SmartPhone is a pretty tiny fraction of the time I am doing one thing or another on it.
Hill: Rob, a lot has been made about the success of Apple's Apps Store, and it has really become a key point of differentiation between Apple and the competition. In your mind, how much of the iPhone's success is because of that Apps Store?
Pegoraro: A lot. But I am starting to think that the way Apple runs the App Store is -- I won't say it is slowing down the iPhone but it is sending some business away in terms of customers who see how Apple runs it with this weird kind of curatorial control and more importantly, application developers who realize that they can spend months working on an application that so far as they know, complies with the rules that Apple has set out, that then gets rejected anyway. You can't just take your iPhone App and then put it on an Android device the next day. It is not that simple to rewrite code from one SmartPhone platform and put that on another one.
Hill: So what is the critical mass that Google Apps has to reach to really take away Apple's advantage?
Pegoraro: I would say we are already at that point. Last I checked, Google was saying they had 50,000 apps in the Android market. (whispering) Don't tell anyone I don't own an iPhone.
Hill: Whoa, whoa, whoa! You don't own an iPhone?!
Pegoraro: I have an Android device myself. And there are a tiny number of times where I am looking for an application and think, you know, it is too bad this isn't available for Android. Either there is an Android app that does the same task that it was going to do with an iPhone app or the same application is available for both iPhone and Android. In some cases, there are applications that are Android-only. My favorite example is a really neat one called Google Sky Map. It is this sort of planetarium app and the way it works, it figures out your location, uses the phone's compass to determine where you are looking and it shows you the stars you should see.
Check out some of our related articles on the smartphone smackdown:
