With the proliferation of Android OS gear, it is becoming near impossible to tell one from the other. The situation is very similar to what prevails in the PC industry, and throughout the consumer electronics space, where numerous mostly similar products are released with distinctions that often aren’t obvious without carefully examining a product’s specs.

Yes, the OS themes are skins might vary, but that’s another issue entirely, since they’re usually meaningless variations that offer little in terms of extra value to the customer.

When it comes to the hardware, the actual variations may be too subtle to make much of a difference in the real world, except for power users and product reviewers who care about such matters.

At one time, Apple was just as guilty of that practice. Back in the days before Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded, Apple offered so many similar versions of the Performa, I doubt that any company product person could explain the differences without a cheat sheet to refer to.

Having far too many similar models, however, benefits a company or, in the case of smartphones, the wireless carriers, because they can flood the market and gain a larger number of customers. Or at least, that’s the plan.

In the end, however, the customer is not being well served.

Take the current Verizon Wireless promotion, where, if you buy one smartphone at the regular subsidized price (usually $199), you get your choice of a second smartphone free. Now when they tie you into a two-year contract, the company can’t lose. More to the point, I have little doubt that the manufacturers likely have to discount products sold in these offers, but if they move enough gear, maybe it doesn’t hurt so much, although overall profit margins are probably not so great.

What happens, however, is that the value of any individual product is lessened. It’s just another smartphone to Verizon Wireless or any of the other carriers. One is no different from another, so long as you take the deal.

Add to that the lack of consistent Android OS branding, and you have one big mess, and the ability to compete with Apple is reduced, even if more units are actually shipped. You can’t depend on the same user interface, nor even what the collection of bundled apps might be. The default search engine will, as I’ve said before, not necessarily even be Google. Verizon last year contracted with Microsoft to deliver Bing on some models.

That’s not the sort of confusion an iPhone or iPad customer suffers. The product look and feel remains consistent across the product lineup. You can be assured that OS upgrades will be promptly accessible and easily downloaded and installed, although some features may not be supported in older models.

The skills you mastered using the original iPhone are easily translated to the iPhone 4 — and the iPad. Sure, there are more features and additional Apple apps, but the basic skills required have changed only slightly, usually to accommodate the new capabilities, such as cut, copy, paste, and multitasking.

With an Android OS smartphone, once you get past the changes in OS themes, you can’t be assured of being able to download the latest and greatest software updates, unless the carrier or manufacturer decides to let you have it. Otherwise, you probably have to “root” or jailbreak your device, and download one of the online disk image files that contain the unvarnished Google OS upgrades.

Is that really a better idea?

Well, for the wireless carriers, yes, since they don’t care which model you buy, so long as you buy something and sign a service contract. No single model is better than another, and distinctive features crafted by the manufacturer may, in part, be subservient to the needs of the carrier.

This is considered a main reason why Apple and Verizon didn’t make a deal early on with the iPhone. Apple wanted full control of the hardware, including the support experience, while Verizon would want to stuff the gadget with V Cast apps and other extra-cost junk.

Visual voicemail? Forget about it, because no other smartphone offers it.

Under such circumstances, the iPhone would have become just another generic smartphone, and Apple’s mobile initiative would have been doomed to failure.

Indeed, when the iPhone was launched, the tech media and competing makers laughed. How could a computer company enter a market with which they were totally unfamiliar and deliver a winning product?

Of course, nobody says that now. As Microsoft struggles to launch the latest Windows Mobile OS, and their partner companies prepare to introduce a new lineup of smartphones for the holiday season, you wonder what, if anything, is being brought to the table. It’s not as if Windows Mobile 7 will deliver anything that you can’t already get in an iPhone or Android OS product. So what’s the point, other than to serve the ego of a company and an erratic CEO that cannot admit that some product initiatives are destined to fail? Evidently the extent of the Kin fiasco still isn’t being grasped.

Of course, Microsoft might just be hoping for a victory in their patent claims against Android OS smartphone makers, and use the royalties to cover the costs of developing more inferior products.

Right now, the iPhone sits in one corner, offering a stable, reliable, predictable and elegant user interface, and loads of other products that mostly the same, but often sport incomprehensible interface variations. Which product line do you prefer?

As industry analysts look to the drop in sales of netbooks, there has been the assumption that the people who used to purchase those dreadful shrunken PCs are opting to buy iPads instead. That has been a growing meme in a number of tech columns.

That is, until a recent survey from the NPD Group indicated it’s really not having that much of an effect. In other words, the iPad is an extra device that more and more people are buying, particularly if they already own other Apple products.

Until now, it was widely believed that the iPad was actually cannibalizing sales of some PCs, and perhaps even Macs, although the effect to the latter was said to be minimal. The main victim was reportedly those netbooks.

Suddenly, the belief system has changed, or at least for those who, like me, take NPD Group seriously as a source of legitimate marketing information.

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There’s a report this week in Fortune that reveals something most of you have realized by now. Just because a competing product is announced, that doesn’t prove that product is any good, or has sales potential.

So, of all those headlines about the coming onslaught of iPad killers, few offer a responsible analysis of the situation. The prevailing meme is that the existence of another tablet-based computer must be evidence that the manufactuer is about to succeed big time, and Apple is fated to be the loser.

That’s the same sort of illogical mental process that followed the announcement of all those iPod killers in the early days. One product after another came out, and they all failed. Even Microsoft, which tried to emulate Apple’s walled garden approach, at the expense of all those PlaysForSure partners, got slammed.

Nowadays, new digital media players, even the Microsoft Zune, don’t merit much attention. You only know that the market is aging, and Apple’s sales are undergoing a long, slow decline, even though the iPod’s market share remains pretty stable.

History may repeat itself with the iPad. There have been a number of product announcements, but only one is evidently available. Worse, the mobile OS for these tablets, based on Google’s Android or Chrome, has yet to be optimized for such products.

That hasn’t halted the rush to ship something, anything, which can go up against the iPad. In keeping with the “look before you leap” approach, the marketing strategies behind these “Pad” gadgets are questionable. We have Samsung wanting to tie you into a data contract with a wireless carrier to bring the price down to a sensible level, about $300. Without a contract, the Galaxy Tab, which seems a decent enough product, may cost as much as $1,000 for a device with a 7-inch screen.

Nobody sees anything wrong with that picture?

At least with Android-powered smartphones, the hardware is often quite decent. Google continues to upgrade the OS to deliver better performance and stuff the feature-set. For the most part, owners of these products appear reasonably satisfied with them, although the OS remains rough around the edges.

A big problem with the Google Android infrastructure is one of branding. You have heard of phones with the word “Droid” in them, for example. But that’s as close as it gets. The ads describe the phone, the carrier’s network, and the latest promotion that’ll save you loads of cash up front. All well and good, but only the power users and industry analysts understand they are using the Android OS, and that means something because it’s open source.

At least with “Intel Inside” PCs, you know, from the ads and the labels on the products themselves, that they use parts from Intel. That may or may not mean something, but at least it’s a consistent message. Same thing for the statement that all those PC boxes run Windows. Even if you hate Windows, and are poised to wipe the drive and install Linux as soon as you open the shipping box, once again the branding is consistent. You know what you’re getting, for better or worse.

To make matters worse for the Android universe, there’s no guarantee that you can upgrade your gear to the latest and greatest OS. The interface may be butchered by the manufacturer or carrier, not to mention adding extra apps that promote a carrier’s or carrier partner’s extra-cost products or services.

This doesn’t mean that there can’t be iPad killers. But the manufacturers so far seem to believe that adding extra hardware features, such as front and rear cameras, will somehow clinch the sale. They do not consider that, while a front camera is a perfectly good idea, assuming it can actually be used for videoconferencing, a rear camera seems less sensible. A tablet is rather an award device for taking snapshots. It’s not just a larger smartphone, although I gather some manufactures might not understand the distinction.

In addition to a camera — which is widely expected to arrive in the next iPad — building a thinner, lighter widget might be a good idea, as that, too, would answer a shortcoming in Apple’s existing tablet. Even that advantage, though, may vanish with iPad 2.0.

For now, Google might do well to take advantage of having a fast-growing mobile OS, with the appropriate branding and advertising. I wonder why you’re not seeing loads of image ads touting the advantages of an open source OS, an app marketplace with few restrictions, and support by a large number of manufacturers and carriers.

To me, that ought to provide a number of perceived advantages. In practice, there are clear limitations that I won’t go into here. But at least the people who buy these phones might better understand what they have, and why it would be a smart idea to get more Android OS gear.

Right now, the people who buy Android OS product, other than those who totally hate Apple or AT&T, are likely doing so because of a specific carrier-based promotion and some snazzy advertising that usually doesn’t explain one product’s advantages over another. If Google thinks they have a better OS and app store, they should tell their customers why. Oh, right, you’re not their customer. You’re the customer of the carrier. Google doesn’t matter, so long as they get a bigger audience for their targeted ads.

So here’s the conventional wisdom (such as it is): Apple is a consumer-oriented tech company. When it comes to the enterprise, IT people look for Windows on a personal computer, and a BlackBerry when it comes to smartphones.

Despite earning record profits and sales almost every quarter, the critics still aren’t satisfied. How could they be? Apple refuses to bend to their demands, so therefore Apple must be on the wrong track.

Unfortunately, when it comes to such theories, facts have a nasty habit of getting in the way. The evidence, however, is not the sudden appearance of a large enterprise-oriented sales organization within Apple, but statements the company makes during quarterly calls with financial analysts and even during special media events, which indicate that the enterprise is actually a strong part of company strategy, even if their approach is different from the rest of the industry.

Take the typical scenario. A company executive buys a MacBook Pro for traveling, or perhaps an iPhone or an iPad. That executive brings the new Apple gadget to work, and informs the IT staff that they have to find room for the new purchase in the company network. Even if the system admins never considered such gear seriously, they’ll discover pretty quickly that a Mac easily mates with a Windows network, and that Apple offers advanced and secure tools to help a company manage iPhones. Those tools are probably second only to RIM in terms of the level of business support.

Suddenly the possibilities of using a Mac or iPhone at work aren’t so outrageous.

Yes, I realize that there are loads of long-time prejudices against Apple. Macs can’t hook up to network printers, Macs don’t integrate well in Windows networks, and there’s no support for the company Microsoft Exchange email server.

I remember a situation back in the late 1990s, where the lone Mac user in a fairly large company asked me to come in to help integrate the computer to the rest of the network, which used PCs. Now cross-platform file sharing wasn’t so simple then, but connecting to the office printer was a piece of cake. In fact, I was able to do it in a couple of minutes, as the IT person ruefully explained to me that doing the same thing on a Windows box was basically a hit or miss proposition.

Yes, I grant that Windows is also far better today in handling networking, printer setups and, indeed, integrating with Macs. But many IT people still believe the old myths, and it’s a sure thing that proper Mac integration might still be a problem in some environments. So I don’t need the cards and letters to remind me how Macs aren’t suitable in your company, even if they can run Windows natively courtesy of Boot Camp.

Let’s return to Apple’s announcements during those analyst and press meetings. You almost always hear how a surprisingly large portion of Fortune 500 companies are deploying Macs and Apple mobile products either for testing or full-blown installations across a company network. Even if Apple isn’t making an overt play for business customers, that’s clearly happening anyway.

Where Apple is suffering is the lack of custom vertical applications for some industries. For example, our family doctor has a small Wi-Fi network, consisting of tablet-based Fujitsu note-books that use a special application designed for medical offices. The doctor’s office manager tells me the system is terribly inefficient, that it actually takes longer to process patient information, even during routine examinations, and thus they can see fewer patients per day.

Yes, I realize there are Mac apps that also support legal or medical offices, but that doesn’t mean this doctor’s problems would be solved. For one thing, if they want a tablet-based system, other than a customized MacBook from Modbook, the choice is the iPad, for which such software is still basically non-existent.

Even if a proper app for medical offices became available, there is no guarantee that the data from a doctor’s existing system can be transferred, or that there wouldn’t be severe delays and extensive retraining for the doctor and his or her assistants.

In such product categories, Apple doesn’t do so well, and businesses may still be forced to rely on a Windows PC to handle the heavy lifting. But for art departments or other divisions that use cross-platform apps, moving to a Mac may not be such a chore. Assuming the apps are similar, and that would certainly include Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and loads of other products, the retraining probably won’t be so difficult. Once the worker gets past the fixed menu bar and different keyboard shortcuts on the Mac, the migration process ought to be fairly straightforward.

But it’s all happening not as the result of Apple making a huge sales push into the enterprise, but — sometimes anyway — as the result of savvy executives trying out new toys and finding that Apple indeed offers the right tool — indeed the best tool — for many business tasks.