&gt; Yes I&#x27;ve owned Newtons, Palm Pilots&#x2F;Handsprings, Treos and XDA&#x2F;SPVs all at launch. All had resistive screens, all were universally awful. The stupid styluses were rubbish.<p>I haven&#x27;t tried any of those in particular, but they&#x27;re all from pretty far before The Capaciting.<p>&gt; You are confusing what is merely a paradigm (in this case WIMP) with what you think is a modern OS.<p>A modern <i>desktop</i> OS, which I&#x27;d define as following WIMP. If you have another definition then I&#x27;d be very interested. iOS (and Android!) might be remotely based on desktop OSes, but with all the defining features stripped out it&#x27;s not really a useful or applicable label anymore.<p>&gt; Tell me, why do I need file system access? Do I really need to manually file away thing in this day and age? Why can I see MP3 files when I&#x27;m trying to open JPGs?<p>Because files are a very useful abstraction if you use more than one application, or for moving between them. I don&#x27;t want to use Okular in particular, I&#x27;m just trying to read this document. I should be able to take a piece of data, and the OS should find something that can open it.<p>&gt; A phone is a personal device, why does it need multi-user access?<p>It was just an example of something that <i>could</i> be used to differentiate it from something that wasn&#x27;t &quot;based on a desktop OS&quot;. I&#x27;m still very curious about where you got that from in the first place, btw.<p>&gt; Why does it need terminal access, a relic of the pre GUI era? Any counter argument that you come up with I can pretty much guarantee will be an edge case.<p>Because the terminal programs already exist, and nobody has bothered to make a GUI equivalent. For example, I would use my old N900 to repartition SD cards when needed, just like I could on my desktop machine. Niche? Sure, but it was useful to have the escape hatch when needed.<p>&gt; Are you referring to the 30%? Go to any other retailer and see if you get that deal.<p>Why should I have to go through a retailer at all?<p>&gt; Approval is arbitrary? Perhaps, but it does keep the malware count down. You do know that Google do it to, right? So do Microsoft. Other than that, running your own content delivery and payment system isn&#x27;t cheap, and neither is managing it, but hey, you keep clutching at those straw men...<p>As opposed to when service providers ran it? Besides, just because all of them do it, that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s the right thing to do.