Apple customarily comes late to the game, sitting and watching and then releasing its own, usually better, take on the current offerings. If Apple went to a party, it would turn up last and leave with the hottest girl there.

Love it!

We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone.

In some ways, all Rubin is doing is carrying over a fundamental idea behind Web 2.0 into the mobile domain: openness, specifically open-sourcing, as fuel for innovation. While Nokia and Blackberry and Motorola (and now Apple) are butting heads, reinventing one another’s wheels (how’s that for some seriously mixed metaphors), Google is taking the same approach to phones as they have taken to the web, which, last time I checked, seemed to have worked out pretty well. In other words, they are making all their mobile software freely available to several major manufacturers by way of the Open Handset Alliance, which currently has 30 some major phone manufacturers as members.

For me, what is most attractive about this model is that, if I so wish, I’ll be able to install software such as Skype, on the phone. In other words, I’ll be able to install free-calling software where it belongs, on a phone, not on my laptop (which was never designed to be a phone.) The reason Google has no problem with this is because their income model is not about charging me for my calls, it’s about ad revenue, which I have no problem with. Of course, someone who will likely have a definite problem with that is AT&T and Verizon, which explains why they so far have taken the Luddite stance (or should I say deer-caught-in-the-google-headlights stance?) of not wanting to join this effort.

Or maybe what they’re really scared of are the GPhone’s team of (very young) designers ;)

Is there a better way to think outside the box (er, phone?) than to ask a bunch of kids what a magic phone would be able to do?

Now, for someone not familiar with this feature (and, actually, for someone who is familiar with the feature), this might seem a bit weird, so let me elaborate. For me, I’ve found that constantly doing a lot of double-clicking causes pain in my wrist, so access to this feature, and the prevention of wrist pain is no small thing. And I guess what is really significant here, is that, even though I know that the Mac OS clearly is superior and just all-around more modern and robust than Windows XP, I still haven’t made the switch. Or, to be more specific, I haven’t made the switch back. For many many years, I was a hardcore Mac-Head, but then I needed to use Visio for my work, and was therefore forced to use a PC. At the beginning, I hated it, but then I discovered that, as with many things once you become more familiar with them, wasn’t so bad at all. (Keep in mind that this was in the pre OS X days, at which time I’d have to say that Windows was in fact the superior OS.)

I have to say that I am really surprised that Apple has not added this, especially with the web making single-click an even more predominant interaction form. I’ve talked to some Mac users and when I describe the feature to them, they are as surprised as I am, especially when I explain some of the bonus benefits of the feature, such as if I am creating a new file and want to name it similarly to another file, I just hover my mouse over that file, at which point the file name field is populated with that value, and I can just modify it (e.g. adding ‘v2′ at the end or whatever.)

If perhaps I should be mistaken, and Apple in fact has added this feature, I’d love to hear about it. I’ve searched extensively for it, including for 3rd party software, but to no avail.