"Eric Schmidt"
Apple's senior executives regularly take potshots at Android during their iPhone and iPad launch events, but now Google's Eric Schmidt has trolled them right back.
In a post on his Google+ profile titled Eric's Guide: Converting to Android from iPhone, Schmidt has suggested that iPhone owners are ripe for conversion to his own company's smartphone platform.
"Many of my iPhone friends are converting to Android. The latest high-end phones from Samsung (Galaxy S4), Motorola (Verizon Droid Ultra) and the Nexus 5 (for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) have better screens, are faster, and have a much more intuitive interface. They are a great Christmas present to an iPhone user!" wrote Schmidt.
"Like the people who moved from PCs to Macs and never switched back, you will switch from iPhone to Android and never switch back as everything will be in the cloud, backed up, and there are so many choices for you. 80% of the world, in the latest surveys, agrees on Android."
His post outlined a series of steps to ensure data, content and (Google) apps successfully transfer from iPhone to Android when switching, including a potshot at Apple's Safari web browser: "Be sure to use Chrome, not Safari; its safer and better in so many ways."
Apple is no stranger to the idea of encouraging people to switch from one platform to another: Schmidt's mention of people moving from PCs to Macs is a direct reference to Apple's "Real People" advertising campaignin 2002, which featured people explaining why they'd switched computers.
More recently, the company has directly criticised Android during speeches and interviews. For example, Apple's chief executive Tim Cookdiscussed the "pretty bleak story" of fragmentation on Android during his WWDC speech in June, telling developers that "more than a third of Android users are using an operating system that was released in 2010".
In March, the company's marketing chief Phil Schiller was even more outspoken, telling the Wall Street Journal that "Android is often given as a free replacement for a feature phone and the experience isn't as good as an iPhone" while disputing market share figures for the respective platforms.
Eric Schmidt's blog post merely continues the public trash-talking between Google and Apple, although his contribution carries extra spice given his position as a member of Apple's board of directors between 2006 and 2009.
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