I also found strange was the "Like the iPhone itself was standing on the shoulders of giants (iPhone to PalmOS: hi daddy!)"

But wasn't PalmOS at least inspired by the Newton?

Right and the point I'd make is his example doesn't hold weight because the first Android touchscreen device looked exactly like an iPhone. Same number of icons per screen, same resolution, same gestures, same icon placement on the applications (at the bottom and constant).

Surely the iPhone inherited from Palm and Windows Phone/PocketPC and both those inherited from Newton. But none of those devices looked exactly the same.

I bought a G1 back in February 2009 around when Android 1.1 was released and it didn't look "exactly like an iPhone". It didn't support multi-touch, it didn't have an on-screen keyboard and the launcher was quite different in operation from iOS. Applications weren't (and still aren't) added to the main launcher screen by default and instead get added to the application drawer. Apps have to be manually added to the home screens. Android of that era also made extensive use of a long-press gesture (I distinctly remember it as I found it quite un-intuitive at the time) which didn't show up in iOS until version 3.2 (except for in the homescreen anyway).

Physically, the devices were quite dissimilar too. The G1 had a smaller screen, was much thicker, had a slideout keyboard and a trackball in addition to five face buttons (Call, End Call, Home, Back and Menu).

Multi-Touch was disabled in the G1 on purpose but was there (it appeared in the European version:http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f8/some-good-videos-on-en...). It didn't have an onscreen keyboard because it had a physical keyboard but Android that an onscreen keyboard (as evidenced in the sdk video). Applications are added to the Apps screen instead of the launcher but Google just added a step.

As for the rest no one was saying the G1 was identical to the iPhone just that the OS looked identical.

The G1 hardware supported it (though not very well), but Android had no support until 2.1 which was never officially available for the G1. It wasn't just turned off. Even if you enabled multi-touch in the kernel with a custom ROM, the rest of the Android stack had no ability to use it. The story was the same in Europe and the US and I don't see anything in that link that provides evidence to the contrary.

Android had no support for an on-screen keyboard until 1.5. The emulator included with the original SDK has a virtual keyboard, but that's part of the emulator skin, not a feature of the OS and is not displayed on the virtual screen. The addition of a software keyboard while not strictly necessary on the G1, was rather useful as it allowed you to enter text while using the phone in a portrait orientation.

At some point, you have a mobile device that you somehow have to interact with. Sorry, but I don't think Apple deserves credit for clickable/pointable/touchable icons (didn't that stuff come out of Xerox parc?).

(I think some of the current mobile stuff comes from the ubiquitous computing research that PARC did.)

They (Apple) deserve the credit for bringing those concepts to a lot of people.

And obviously it is true that interacting with objects/icons on a touchscreen is a general solution.

But the problem is not Android doing that, the problem is they lend all the aspects iOS makes original to include it in their concept. And Samsung copies the hardware look and feel.

That's the easy way to go for them. I think they could have come up with something different. Making the concept even better. But at the current situation, they will always be behind iOS, because Apple knows way better how to do great, usable interfaces. I guess iOS 6 will bring more widgets to the notification center and maybe animated/live icons or something like that.

These are the parts Google did new on Apples conceptual idea, and they will eventually come to iOS too, but more refined in a more cohesive way. Google needs to think differently.