Anyone familiar with Vanjoki knows better than to compare him with Steve Ballmer. Now, contrast maybe...

Android (or iOS) may be the soup du jour but the desktop and the handheld are rapidly converging.....good luck to all the players because the field is rapidly enlarging. With this larger field, expect ALOT more players.......many veterans too. A very entertaining game to watch!

Windows computers are actually a very bad example as they confirm the original point - the only permanently dominant company was Microsoft, the hardware vendors rose and fell, came and went. Very few of those who were in the original PC business are still with us (HP the only notable exception that comes to mind). IBM, Amstrad, Compaq, Epson, Olivetti, WYSE, Zenith, just to name a few big players that no longer do PCs (or exist at all)... All of them huge at the time, but didn't survive. At best every major manufacturer had rough patches in the cutthroat arena of commoditized PC hardware.

AND, google has already said theat they don't think android is ideal for tablets and are going to try chromeOS on their own reference tablet IF they release one

Yes ! But profit margins for PC sales are razor thin since it is a commoditized hardware nearly.

But profit margins from Smartphone sales are much higher - and I am sure each manufactirer (HTC, Moto Nokia) will try to protect the margins - and thats where the differentiation comes in. None of these players want the smartphone to become a commodity hardware running the same OS underneath, if they want to enjoy the profits - and its in Smartphones segment that the greatest profit margins are.

And you KNOW that somewhere down the road, there won't be a difference between the two. (i.e. ChromeOS running Android apps)

I disagree. The market is highly saturated...Android platform is on practically every carrier. High end, low end... Some more than others. Nokia can stand out or be that ALTERNATIVE that a lot of people are looking for but for some reason they keep developing Linux-based OS's (Maemo/MeeGo) that they soon after, drop like the plague only to go back to Symbian.

Symbian doesn't make the consumer's mouths water and they need to understand that. I hope Nokia will wake up and finally take a look around. Oh yeah btw, that was my foretelling about MeeGo. Nokia it seems is already disavowing any mention of it and has become uncomfortable when confronted about it. Nokia World was a prime example of this behavior. Just stop running in place...

They haven't dropped MeeGo, they dropped Maemo to continue with MeeGo together with Intel. The result being they can make both ARM and Intel devices running essentially the same software.

Maemo turned out to be a dead end road with no future, so what? get over it. This is probably the strangest things with all these symbian bashing threads. Symbian is the most successful mobile OS by far, and it just continue to grow. Meamo is one of the least successful mobile OS'es (not a bad OS by any means, but it has no future, there is no place for it in the mobile world).

Android may seem like the golden duck for some people here, but it is not. SE X10 Mini and soon to come X8 is killing all high end Android devices. Android phones are defined by the OS, and SE has lowered the list without lowering the specs. From a consumer point the value of the X10 mini and X8 is very high, and for any devices more high end (read: more pricey) than those two, the value drops like a stone, because the OS is the same, the definition of the phone has not changed, only the price.

Google may very well want it all, but it is not realistic, the marked is by nature much too segmented and differentiated. The only way to make this happen would be if Google made different versions of Android (starter, home and pro and then some more versions). This would perhaps work if they started 10-15 years ago (as Nokia did), but not today anyway, and certainly not with an OS that is essentially open source, and not when they have no hardware on their own. For Android to even survive in the near future, they have to focus on a segment where they reach out to most people, and that is the X10 Mini/X8 segment, and for the time being this suits SE and Huawei just fine. HTC on the other hand, will soon be in real problems, but maybe not, Windows Mobile 7 is coming. Motorola on the other hand, will vanish. IMHO of course

so what does google stand to gain from this?

I get what you're saying, and I don't mind admitting that my connotation - notice I didn't say denotation - is a bit softer than most in that regard.

So let's go with the consensus backed connotation of short-term. I still have to think that Nokia is guilty of this with the N8.

But we'll see.