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Steve Jobs lets rip about tablets, BlackBerry, Android and everything else in the world

My, my Steve Jobs. Once you pop, you just can’t stop with the zingers, can you? On a quarterly results call with journalists and analysts last night, Jobs laid into Android, had a pop at BlackBerry and explained why the iPad will win the tablet war.

Jobs only usually makes an appearance on these calls when he has something to shout about, and this time it was Apple’s first $20 billion quarter – that’s $20 billion dollars in three months. I’ll just give you a minute to let your eyes revert back to pupils instead of dollar signs.

But once the bragging was out of the way, he had plenty to say about the Apple iPhone breezing past RIM’s BlackBerry in terms of sales – with a little advice we’re sure Mike Lazaridis will be taking right on board:

“We’ve now passed RIM, and I don’t seem them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.”

RIM wasn’t the only company Steve felt it time to share his thoughts on. Of course iOS’s main contender, Android, came under fire too. According to Jobs, Android is too fragmented to catch Apple up:

“Android is very fragmented. Many Android OEMs, including the two largest, HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The users will have to figure it all out. Compare this with iPhone, where every handset works the same… we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed. And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.”

Next, Jobs went on to talk about “the avalanche of Tablets” en route to our shelves. After complaining that all these 7-inch tablets are too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad, Jobs went on to say that unless users can sand your fingers down by three quarters, a 7-inch screen is just not going to work. Of course, the 10-inch iPad screen is perfect, no finger-whittling required.

There are plenty more Zing!-worthy moments in Steve Jobs’ transcript, which you can read in full here. It’s actually refreshing to hear a CEO let rip on pertinent issues – but when it’s Apple being smug about its success, it is not quite so satisfying.

[Image by Kevin Van Aelst]

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