There's a legitimate argument to be made for leaving the iPhone and going to Android, but Newsweek's Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) utterly, bitterly failed to make it last week in his column on switching from Apple to Google's mobile platform.

It was so outlandish I wrote most of this up and then decided not to use it, but a combination of slow news day (US holiday) and some of the switcher and technorati commentary that's followed made me reconsider reconsidering. So here it is. And before you start calling me an "Apple fanboy" or apologist, I'd preface it by saying we have one heck of an Android team here at SPE, led by Phil Nickinson, and each and every one of them could have nailed a switcher article with style and grace -- what Newsweek ran did just as much a disservice to Android as it did the iPhone.

Okay, so Lyons feels the new version of Android 2.2, Froyo, "blows the doors" off the iPhone OS. Only Froyo hasn't shipped to consumers yet, just like Apple's next generation operating system, iPhone OS 4, hasn't shipped to consumers yet. (We'll see the final version of iPhone OS 4 at WWDC next Monday.)

Flash is one of the first things Lyons mentions. Froyo will support it, Apple has said it will decidedly not. Apple's point is at least understandable given their usual behavior. Google's reeks of being reactionary and tactical. Apple is a controlling company exerting control by not allowing Flash. Google is a company that has championed open web standards suddenly throwing full throated support behind a proprietary plug-in which is not open. If anything, I'd of expected Google (and even more so Palm) to take the lead against Flash and towards HTML5.

But politics makes strange bedfellows.

Lyons says Froyo beats OS 4 because it supports tethering (which he lumps in with the separate but admittedly far more interesting mobile hotspot service), and Apple and AT&T do not. He's halfway right there. Somewhat. The iPhone has supported tethering for almost a year, since iPhone OS 3.0 shipped in June 2009. AT&T has chosen not to offer it. And guess what? AT&T could easily choose not to offer Android 2.2 tethering either and just strip it out. Or they could choose to offer it and charge for it. So could any other carrier. Case in point, mobile hotspot for the EVO 4G on Sprint will cost you. The pipes belong to the carrier, you can't complain bitterly about Apple's penchant for control when one of the issues you're complaining about involves an area where users suffer due to the lack of Apple control.

I use free iPhone tethering on Rogers HSPA 7.2 all the time. It's fantastic.

Froyo's ability to let you buy songs over the air (OTA) and download them directly to your phone is likely awesome. It's been awesome on the iPhone since OS 3.0 as well. Tap iTunes Store, tap the song you want, and it downloads directly. Apple thought it was important enough to give up the $0.99 price point for and it's nice Lyons finally learns about it via Google I/O nearly a year later. Streaming songs from your music library is also great in Froyo, and something iPhone OS leaves for 3rd party apps, which previously included Simplify, and app bought by Google, likely to power their streaming. Smart move.

Why doesn't Apple do this directly? I'd like them too as well. Now that Google has removed Simplify from the App Store, maybe they will. Maybe it will involve the iTunes.com service they're rumored to be working on. Either way, right now it's not there. Fair point.

Lyons lauds Google's tone towards Apple at Google I/O. The tone where Andy Rubin likened Apple to North Korea. The tone where Vic Dundotra said Google developed Android because they "faced a draconian future where one man, one company, one carrier would be our future." -- which was utterly laughable considering Google bought (not developed) Android 2 years before Apple announced the iPhone and 3 years before Apple announced the App Store (which Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board of directors!). Never mind Google's position in search and online advertising is far, far scarier than Apple's tiny share of the smartphone market.

Google didn't come off as mature or professional in any of those statements. They came off as frightened and duplicitous, and it was disappointing given the strength and growth of Android.

A proud, straightforward Google would have admitted that both open and closed models have their good and bad points. Apple's control gives them a remarkable user experience but results in frustration for segment of their developer community and user base. Google's open platform gives them amazing diversity but results in fragmentation (not legacy) that also frustrates a segment of their developer community and user base. There's no magic model. Everything is about making choices. If that makes Apple North Korea it makes Google any of a number anarchistic, warlord-strewn territories. Hyperbole is unfortunately just another double-edged sword.

He also trots out the Q1 results of Android outselling iPhone in the US. Where the iPhone is on one carrier and Android is on almost 4 (we don't really count that AT&T Backflip, do we?). Where the iPhone has been on the market since the previous summer and Verizon had just given the then-brand-new Droid a huge marketing push. Where users on Verizon desperate for an iPhone that still hadn't gone CDMA, and not willing to go Storm, had not competent touch-screen rival other than Android. In markets like Canada and the UK where the Droid (Motorola Milestone) competes directly against the iPhone on the same carriers, the results haven't been the same. That's another difference between Apple's "one phone" and Google's "many phones" model -- there's no direct comparison.

Lyons finishes with a bizarre diatribe against Apple and Steve Jobs and another conflation of AT&T into his argument against the iPhone.

The reality is Apple and Google (and others) are giant corporations who keep control over what makes them money (Apple hardware and ecosystem, Google search and advertising) and use open, free offerings to compete in areas that don't make them money. Neither are good or evil, neither are better than the other.

There's a legitimate case to be made for someone switching from iPhone to Android -- deep integration of Google services, especially in the US where Navigation and Voice are included, CDMA options in the US, a less regulated application market, form factors that include a keyboard, etc.

Lyons just doesn't make that argument. He doesn't even try.

[Newsweek]

Fake Steve Jobs, the nom de guerre of Newsweek's Dan Lyons, got a ton of attention for his Operation Chokehold campaign to effectively DDoS the AT&T data network, including from AT&T itself and the FCC, not to mention pretty much every commenter on the interwebs who, while they might have applauded the cause, didn't much appreciate the method.

Along with a quick follow up conversation with Fake AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson, where Fake Steve again absolutely excoriates the iPhone's lone US carrier for making billions in profit on iPhone data plans while apparently cutting investments in the very network infrastructure on which the iPhone is supposed to use that data, he first tried to back track a tad, and then just went... a little nuts.

As has happened in the past, Fake Steve is taking the criticisms and spinning it into a farce including hooks into the Tiger woods scandal, historic figures of social conscious, terrorists, former and current heads of state, and now pretty much everything short of a kitchen sink app for iPhone.

In the end, we can't help but think his original point -- that AT&T isn't investing in a network to support the iPhone and future mobile computing platforms even though they have the resources to do so, and are maximizing short-term shareholder profits over long-term share-holder and customer value -- has gotten lost in the gimmick.

And that's a shame, because AT&T really needs to invest in their network and give iPhone users the infrastructure they're paying for.

UPDATE: Gizmodo also shows, in nifty, PowerPointy form, how AT&T is making more money, yet spending less on networks, since the original iPhone was released.

[Thanks to everyone who sent in many and wonderful variants of all this!]

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Join Rene and Matt Miller of NokiaExperts.com for Round Robin Symbian and Maemo vs. iPhone, Apple vs. Nokia patent lawsuits, Fake Steve vs. AT&T, App Store's new look, App Store's still broken, and the Google Phone (NOT!). Listen in!

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In response to Fake Steve's call for Operation Chokehold -- a flashmob event intended to overwhelm AT&T's data network -- AT&T has told Cult of Mac:

We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.

Fake Steve has responded thusly:

AT&T has a much bigger problem on its hands. The problem is that the wireless data explosion is just beginning. This 3% of AT&T users who are supposedly accounting for 40% of bandwidth use? Pretty soon that 3% is going to become 30%. [...] The whole point of having these mobile devices is to consume data. This is not just about the iPhone. There’s the Droid, and the Pre, and soon there will be the Nexus One and a zillion other Android phones. Plus all the tablets. This is the future. We are going to carry these devices and use them as our televisions, our radios, our newspapers.

And finishes with:

Go look at [AT&T's] financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

Irresponsible? Pointless? Yes, that sounds familiar.

Valid arguments all around, then?

Fake Steve Jobs has had enough of AT&T and their "bastardly behavior over bandwidth usage" and so is launching a crowd-sourced, flash-mobbed, Rickson Gracie-style assault on their network called "Operation Chokehold":

Subject: Operation Chokehold

On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

TiPb commented on Fake Steve's previous, glorious AT&T flamefest and Ralph de la Vega's statements that lit the latest match in this particular powder keg.

Let us know how you feel about Operation Chokehold in the comments. Are you warming up YouTube, standing next to a cell tower, and just waiting to press "play"? Or is it just kicking a network when it's (quite often) down at this point?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

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Dieter and Rene discuss the iPhone 3.1 Beta, the return of Steve Jobs (and Fake Steve), iPhone 3GS news, and questions from the live chat. Listen in!

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iPhone 3.1 and OS News

• Speaking of charge cases, TiPb got the tip that some chargers were having trouble under 3.0, but that Apple knows about it and will be fixing it soon in 3.1...
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General News

• Heeeeeee's Baaaaaack: Steve Jobs returns to Apple
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• Mobile YouTube Uploads Increasing 400% PER DAY Since iPhone 3GS Launch
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• One of our favorite threads, started by SM12, has just been given new life by the iPhone 2G birthday -- what phone did you have before the iPhone?
• With iPhone 3.1 just around the corner, Ivoryplum wants to know what you'd like to see in the next iPhone OS update?

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple comes the return of Fake Steve to the interwebs. Fake Steve also returns to being bitingly satirical, something that had been lacking before its own hiatus. Recent gems include the excoriation of the New York Times, and lambasting Palm (twice) for focusing on Apple rather than the Pre in their own advertisements:

Do you remember what the ads for the original iPhone looked like? You remember seeing anything in those ads about the BlackBerry or the Treo? No. It was a whole new thing -- sui generis, as the French say. It had to be. If all we could do was to make a slightly less s****y BlackBerry, and offer it for a few bucks less than what RIM was charging, we would not have bothered to make the product.

(Though he may be reaching in his claims of just how far Jon Rubinstein will go to be like "him".)

If you're easily offended, stay clear. Otherwise, enjoy it while it lasts...

Fake Steve, the hilarious or hateful (depending on your take, I lean towards the former) blogalter-ego of former Forbes writer, current Newsweek writer retired a while back, only to re-emerge as himself: Real Dan. His debut post? Fake Steve buys an iPhone, gets no respect. (Warning: Real Dan's language is as salty as Fake Steve's ever was, so not for the easily offended).

Finally I traveled out to the horrible Burlington mall where I bought the iPhone and was stopped at the door of the Apple store by an incredibly [redacted]ish Apple “concierge” (that’s Spanish for “smug useless [redacted]head”) who heard me out and then told me, politely, to go [redacted] myself because Apple couldn’t fix the email address on my account. I was like, Dude you’re the retards who typed it in wrong. Shouldn’t you fix it? He told me, again, very politely, to go [redacted] myself. I was like, Dude do you know who I am? I invented Fake Steve. Have you heard of him? He was like, Fake who? What? Huh? He then suggested I go bother the morons at the AT&T store in the same mall. I did, and there I was met by an even more developmentally disabled cretin who said AT&T couldn’t help me either.

It's the end of the blogsphere as we know it, and dagnabit I don't feel fine. Why? Fake Steve is retiring. Former Forbes columnist Dan Lyons, who once panned bloggers and later rose to internet stardom after being exposed as one of the most infamous -- and best in some opinions -- bloggers of them all, is heading to Newsweek and will be switching his posting over to his own name. No doubt his content will continue to be razor sharp and wickedly insightful -- if not inciting -- but Fake Steve has become such an icon of the Web 2.0 age that I can't help but think the loss of Dear Leader, El Jobso, the wake-and-baker himself will leave the net just a little emptier.

Sappy much? Go read his Greatest Hits (scroll down the sidebar) if you haven't already. iPhone fans may want to start here.

Now let's all raise our precisely 98 degree organic, monkey-picked health teas (in bone-white #7 porcelain cups) in toast, b'okay?

Namaste Fake Steve. We honor the place where your sarcastic wit and our laughter met.

Okay, so their names weren't really Harold & Kumar (Fukaba and Vincenti, for the record), but then again it doesn't really sound like they were banned for life from the Apple Store as initial Interwebs rumor mongering suggested, b'okay?

Seems some Palo Alta teens were waiting for a classmate, ducked into the Apple Store to burn some time, and ended up getting burned instead. You know the story, boy finds iPhone, boy Jailbreaks iPhone, boy downloads Raging Thunder, to show another boy, Apple Store management, security, police, and parents become involved and hilarity ensues. (Though perhaps not for our hapless hax0rs and their two friends).

Fake Steve has the full fake details on what sounds to me like a bit of a fake -- or more accurately overblown -- story.

Hopefully no iPhones were bricked in the course of these shenanigans and the boys will be back to giving all their money to Apple again in the near future.