Katherine Noyes at PC World thinks the mobile future belongs to Android:

A hallmark of Apple's approach has always been putting users in a "walled garden" whereby they are "protected" from having to deal with the computer's nuts and bolts directly. Hand-in-hand with that approach comes restrictiveness; users are only allowed to do things that Apple has decided to let them do, just as they can only buy applications that have been preapproved. Apple insists on controlling the whole ecosystem.

That might be a problem if there were anything really missing from that garden; the reality is, there isn't. The other reality is simpler: with computers, a significant minority of users wants to tweak and hack. Phones, on the other hand, are end consumer devices. Just as there aren't many people who want to hack TV's, there aren't that many who want to hack phones.

I just don't see the controlled nature of the app store being a problem anytime soon - and I'm not at all sure that Google can compete with the user experience that Apple brings to the game.

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