• Newsweek, Friday, January 14, 2011 1:44 PM

Despite what will likely be "huge demand" for the forthcoming Verizon iPhone, the partnership is coming too late for Apple to challenge Android's mobile monopoly. So says Daniel Lyons, author of "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs," in Newsweek (in a column that originally appeared in The Daily Beast). Along with rapid quality improvements, Google's mobile operating system has one key advantage over the iPhone -- "diversity," says Lyons.

"The iPhone, in contrast, is a bit like the situation people once had with Henry Ford's Model T, where you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. With the iPhone you can have whatever Steve Jobs says you can have." Lyons says he used to be "a pretty hard-core iPhone fan," but, like so many consumers, his devotion was slowly eroded by AT&T's notoriously atrocious service. "Frankly, I didn't care whether Android could match an iPhone feature-for-feature," he says. "All I cared was that I could get a smart phone that ran on Verizon and therefore could successfully make phone calls. But since then I've become hooked."

Read the whole story at Newsweek »