Buggy OSes are a "new reality"? Welcome to the Matrix!

Now I'm not sure how bad the Storm's OS is, but it seems unfair at this point to claim Palm did better, since we've only observed pre-production versions of WebOS in controlled demos; we don't know that the secrecy surrounding it for a while is actually going to yield a clean 1.0 release.

While I may not like a whole lot of the decisions Apple put into their iPhone, there is a legitimate comparison there; they did put out a stable release, and all the missing features and capabilities were predictable designed behavior. I think I'd rather have bugs, though.

Yes, but the early-adopter geek types don't need it to make a black-friday release date, so they clearly weren't aware of the distinction here. Maybe launching it a week before Christmas would have been better; less beta, and only the diehard geeks rush out and buy one.