JOBS RIPS INTO GOOGLE AND RIM

Steve Jobs made an appearance on the conference call Apple held to announce their quarterly results. He ended up going on a 5-minute rant about RIM, Google, fragmentation and 7-inch tablets.  Commenting on RIM, the makers of the popular Blackberry devices, Steve had this to say: "We've now passed RIM and I don't see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future... I think it's going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform" and "With 300k apps on Apple's app store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb."

Jobs was just as candid about Google's Android OS, which competes directly with Apple's iOS devices like the iPhone and soon the iPad.  He has a major problem with the fragmentation the open-source OS has taken (each manufacturer can change Android to fit their business plan as well as the carriers changes leading to multiple closed systems based on Android).  Jobs stated: "we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time."

Steve called the upcoming competition to the iPad, a slew of 7-inch tablets due out by end of year, "DOA".  He doesn't believe that is the right size for a tablet or even a pocket computer saying "This size[7-inch] is useless unless you include sandpaper so users can sand their fingers down to a quarter of their size." and that people have no need for pocket sized computers since they already have smartphones.

Steve Jobs followed up his diatribe with a Q&A session. [Engadget] [Gizmodo]