While I do agree with some of your comments, particularly on the AppStore, I have a few comments…

iPod batteries: I have an iPod Nano with a non-removable battery which is a couple of years ago and still going strong, so I feel in this instance Apple have got it right. With phones which have much shorter battery life, a replaceable battery could be useful, but there is obviously going to be a compromise.

iPhone aerial: I have had an iPhone4 since launch date and haven’t had any issues with reception compared to my previous iPhone 3G; after a couple of days I did buy the bumper though not because it was dropping calls. I know quite a number of people who have bought iPhone 4s and to my knowledge none have returned them under the 30 day offer. Having said that, I thought Steve Jobs’ comment ‘not to hold it that way’ was most arrogant and not at all helpful.

AppStore: I partly agree with you, but feel that there does need to be a gatekeeper to test out the quality of the apps before they are released. When one can have numerous apps installed, and say the phone OS starts crashing, or the battery runs out in half a day, or the phone starts dialing premium rate numbers…. for many the phone will get the blame.

With mobile phones it is good to have a competition in Android, and it will be interesting to see how the Android ‘Marketplace’ deals with these issues and others of its own; for example some of the lower end Android phones have a low screen resolution so will be unable to run many apps. The other disappointing thing with Android is that although Android is royalty free, the cost of the better Android phones such as Samsung Galaxy S is not significantly cheaper than iPhone4; hopefully this will change with the ever increasing competition.Another issue with Android is that a number of manufacturers (HTC particularly) have put skins on, and they are very slow at releasing OS updates for the older phones; for example unfortunate users who bought the HTC Hero are still running Android 1.6 despite Android 2.x being out since late last year; the update has been promised for months and months and is due imminently.

Flash: While this has turned out to be a mudslinging match with Steve Jobs and Adobe, it is worth pointing out that until very recently there have been multiple issues with the Flash player for any mobile platform – mainly stability and battery drain; the one for Symbian was buggy for ages; the one for Windows Mobile was eventually withdrawn though apparently a player will be relaunched with the new Windows phone 7. Even on the Android platform, it would appear that the pre-2.x releases are not supported. I do agree that there really isn’t any good reason why there shouldn’t be Flash for the iPad. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t really any royalty-free alternative; I thought things were looking up with html5, but with the licensing of the codecs it appears not to be the case.

P.S. I’m not an Apple fan, though I have to admit iPod Nano is superior to competition. iTunes application client, on the other side, is total bloatware.