You can bet that the day Apple announced the forthcoming release of iPhone 4 and iOS 4, members of the tech media dissected the fine details in hopes of getting a story, or even a story behind the story. Some actually had a few minutes face time with the new gadget at last week’s WWDC conference, so they were at least able to speak knowledgeably on the subject. As to the rest, well, if you can’t deliver facts, rely on something else.

So we have all those inevitable feature comparisons, bullet point listings indicating whether or not iPhone 4 has a feature, and if a similar feature is available on a competing product, usually one that incorporates the Google Android OS. If the latter has something not yet available on the iPhone, the assumption is that Apple has a potential sales problem.

Consider the new iPhone’s rear and front facing cameras. Well, some Android phones have that too. End of story. Nowhere do they explain whether or not those Android phones can do video chatting as seamlessly as the iPhone using FaceTime (they can’t, even if you include some awkward third-party app). The hardware is the beginning and the end.

When Apple touted the retina display, one or two supposed visual experts chimed in to say that it wasn’t good enough. You’d need a higher resolution setting or hold the iPhone some 18 to 24 inches away before the pixels vanish. This is where theories and the real world lie far apart. It appears that someone with normal vision — say 20/20 with or without correction — wouldn’t be able to see individual pixels at some 12 inches distant. I realize a few of you have better vision, but that is pretty much in line with Apple’s claims, but at least it made for a story about whether that claim is an absolute lie.

More to the point, which Android OS handsets sport resolutions of 326 pixels per inch or better? Everyone who has actually used an iPhone 4 extols its superior display quality, while the images on Android phones are certainly good enough, it’s not as if they are running high-resolution games and such. Apple decided that good enough wasn’t sufficient.

When it comes to the iOS, the comparisons are usually done in the same fashion, which is feature by feature. Strict bullet points, without bothering to determine how well the features are actually implemented in these devices. And, yes, I know that some people say that Apple’s new multitasking scheme isn’t sufficient to suit their needs.

Unfortunately, this lame-brained comparison scheme is the same used when one matches up Mac OS X with Windows. It’s the sort of mindset that infects such reviewing outlets as Consumer Reports magazine, although they have never actually evaluated these two operating systems in any meaningful way. They just exist, and are two roads to the same destination, period.

I would hope that, when the iPhone 4 ships, reviewers will treat the product fairly and actually use it and its rivals before making judgments. That may be a stretch, but it would at least be a logical and responsible way to approach the subject. You’d want to know not just what features these smartphones contain, but how well implemented they might be, along with the stability, performance and usability of the operating system.

You see, here’s where Apple has traditionally been triumphant. Yes, competing products may sport more hardware and software features, but Apple has a knack for integrating them in a way that makes them more intuitive, more consistent, more reliable. Perfect? No chance, but usually functional in a way that seems to elude the competition.

I recall those recent TV ads for the iPad, extolling the fact that you “already know how to use it,” which doesn’t just talk to existing iPhone and iPod touch users, but to a larger segment of the population that might be concerned over the complexities of mastering the next great gadget.

Now let me put my cards on the table: I haven’t touched an iPhone 4. I am eligible for an upgrade at the standard “discount” price plus an $18 activation fee from AT&T. Knowing my perilous finances these days, it’s questionable whether I’ll be prepared to buy one by the June 24th introductory date. On the other hand, with Radio Shack claiming they are offering substantial trade-in allowances on existing iPhones in “good condition,” maybe I will be able to get myself a late Father’s Day gift for little or no cash outlay.

I will continue to write about the new iPhone regardless, but I will make it quite clear whether I am just using facts I’ve gleaned from articles and spec sheets, or from personal experience with the new device. Once the iPhone 4 is in the stores, I will be visiting the local Radio Shack, which is a short walk from here, and will spend as much time as I can examining the new product to see whether the promise and reality are actually realized. No guesses, just the facts! I wish some of my presumed colleagues treated these subjects as fairly.

Although Apple, until recently, had the word “Computer” in the corporate name, the product lines frequently extended far beyond that title. Don’t forget that the original LaserWriter, which, along with Adobe PostScript and PageMaker, heralded the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s, came from Apple.

One of the first digital cameras was the Apple QuickTake, a Kodak-built gadget that was launched in 1994. Don’t forget the Newton, and the eMate 300, a true precursor to the iPad. Over the years, Apple has continued to build products that did not strictly conform to the PC mold, even though you might regard some of them as mere accessories.

When Steve Jobs took over as CEO and worked hard to keep the company from sinking — and he has admitted that Apple was at one time 90 days from going out of business — he cut back on non-performing products, focusing on Macs and not much else.

In 2001, Apple probably made its biggest move beyond its core computer competency with the first iPod. I expect most of you regarded it as little more than a curiosity at the time, especially considering the fact that digital music players had gone virtually nowhere up till then.

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Having endured those dreadful “Droid does” TV ads that never quite explain what purposes they actually serve beyond making phone calls, it’s clear that Verizon Wireless is doing what they can to boost market share.

Unfortunately, that means dumping smartphones.

How so? Well, have you seen all those two-for-one offers? Buy one, get one free. That sounds fine at your local restaurant, but when you’re talking about tech gadgets that are each worth hundreds of dollars, you wonder how Verizon can possibly profit. In the end, I suppose there’s enough wiggle room in those two-year contracts to make up the difference, particularly when you take an unlimited voice deal and other frills. Or maybe the handset makers are cutting their prices to the bone to help the cause.

In recent months this marketing scheme has clearly paid off. According to the NPD Group, sales of Android OS phones in the U.S. exceeded those of the iPhone in recent months. That happened even though Apple still moves more product worldwide.

How that’s going to change in the current quarter is anyone’s guess, though the experts feel Apple will still gain the upper hand with iPhone 4 and iOS 4, even though Verizon is still running those miserable TV spots and the promise of super cheap hardware if you’ll only become a customer.

Now there’s nothing wrong with vigorous competition. That’s how companies sometimes learn to build better products, better marketing campaigns, and sometimes a little of both. It also gives you, the customer, more choices, and that’s a good thing assuming that the various makes and models being offered are really all that different.

There’s the rub. You see, it doesn’t matter if the display has a few more pixels and there’s a slightly more robust camera if onscreen text doesn’t look that great and the gadget takes poor snapshots. This is where Apple manages to stay ahead of the competition. Yes, you can easily do a standard bullet point comparison and find iPhone 4 and the latest and greatest Android OS hardware offer somewhat similar specs. OS features match up closely as well.

Apple’s advantage, and to some it’s a disadvantage, is the integrated system that means the hardware is perfectly in tune with the software. The five megapixel chip on iPhone 4 will supposedly yield better photos than camera chips that meet or exceed that spec on rival products, although we won’t know for sure until the reviews are in. Being able to edit your high-definition movies with the optional iMovie app is a plus, although it would be nice to have a hardware or software stabilization capability. It’s really hard to hold such a tiny device steady while filming away.

Of course, what Apple is doing now is no different from the way they mastered the digital music player market when the iPod was first introduced. Through the years, so-called iPod killers emerged, most of which sported better specs or some feature advantage of one sort or another, such as a built-in FM radio.

In the end, the customers decided that having a music player that just worked most of the time, along with a seamless way to synchronize your music and videos, helped cement the deal. The integrated ecosystem trumped separates.

Even Microsoft realized that fact when they double-crossed their PlaysForSure partners and developed the Zune. But they were too late. The iPod won, and cribbing iPod features from a year or two earlier didn’t help Microsoft.

The competition seems better focused when you pit the iPhone against Android. Of course, Google isn’t in it to sell hardware. They simply want more eyeballs to look at their targeted ads and maybe click a few here and there. That’s another area where Apple has a trump card. Apple is going to block attempts to by Google’s AdMob system to scrape your location and browsing data. That means lost eyeballs, and less potential income for Google.

Supposedly Apple’s iAd will deliver advertising content of superior equality, which means that you might even be tempted to watch the announcements from time to time and consider the products and services offered. You can also easily move on without being further disturbed.

Basically, this has become Apple’s game to lose. If the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 are buggy, customers may quickly demand refunds and move on to the competition. Of course, the same is true for all those Android handsets that Verizon is dumping into the marketplace. If customers decide that even a two-for-one deal doesn’t give them satisfactory handsets, the campaign might end up a money loser. But if the products are, as early reviews indicate, almost as good as today’s iPhone in some respects, Verizon will laugh all the way to the bank.

Of course, in the import and export world, when you dump product, you risk the consequences from governments who want to product domestic industries. But if Verizon Wireless wants to flood the market with free phones to beat AT&T and other competitors, so be it. Maybe that maneuver will also help reduce prices for other smartphones — even the iPhone.

I realize that many of you hate Web banners, and you go out of your way to avoid them. Some of you even use ad blockers to prevent their display. At the same time the people who deliver free Web content need to pay the bills, and banners are one of the main sources of income. No banner income, no site.

Yes, it’s true that some publishers are making a big effort to use subscriptions to monetize their online content, and the Wall Street Journal is a prime example. But since so much content is available free, I don’t think the subscription option will sustain itself except for a few special cases, and that includes the iPad apps for such publications as Time and Wired. So we’re back to free and the need for banner advertising in order to put food on the table.

Call me selfish, but I also hope that the ads we run don’t overwhelm the content, so you can find my commentaries without much extra navigation.

With Safari 5, quietly introduced via a press release hours after this week’s WWDC keynote, Apple has tried to address a number of shortcomings of previous versions, in the hope that they can leapfrog the latest and greatest that includes Google Chrome and Opera. So performance is said to beat the competition, and, courtesy of DNS prefetching, complicated sites with loads of links will appear faster.

But the feature that catches my attention almost immediately is Reader. It’s similar to such third-party add-ons as Readability, but Apple almost always manages to implement an existing feature with a special element of pizzazz. They don’t invent so much as improve.

So, if Safari can correctly parse the text in a Web document, you’ll see a Reader button magically appear at the right side of the address bar. It can also be invoked by Command-Shift-R or from the View menu, but only if Reader can operate on that site.

When you click Reader, the text appears in a pop-up window, and the background is darkened. Convenient icons at the bottom of the page let you change text size, print or email. This is similar to the way Safari presents PDF pages in a browser window, and no doubt a similar interpretation engine is being used.

In the real world, Reader works quite well. Since this site already has a built-in Print function, I also noticed that Safari used that function when I actually printed a copy of one of my commentaries, complete with our logo; normally Reader is restricted to text. I don’t know if that’s a tribute to the work of Lester Chan, who created WP-Print for the WordPress blogging platform, or some smart programming from Apple’s Safari development team.

In the end I’m quite hopeful that Internet advertising won’t suffer seriously. The ads will still be there when you connect to a site, and if you really want to use Reader, the site’s content must be reasonably appealing, which means you’re apt to return. So making it easier to read our content may end up being a good thing. Perhaps more of you will be inclined to click on the ads that interest you, which will encourage advertisers to renew their contracts.

Now here’s the rest of the story:

In the scheme of things, Safari 5 is quite a worthy upgrade to what was already my favorite browser, regardless of platform. Yes, I realize some of you prefer Firefox, because you can add all those extensions, but now that Apple has added a similar feature, maybe some of those add-ons will ultimately come to Safari too.

For me, Firefox never quite struck me as a fully native Mac OS X application, perhaps the result of being ported using a cross-platform tool. Worse, application launch times were always a tad slow, compared to the near-instantaneous opening for Safari and, in fact, Google Chrome.

When it comes to Chrome, I can’t say that it handles sites any better than Safari. After all, Google also uses Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, so they should look pretty much the same.

What’s more, measuring browser speeds is largely an exercise in futility nowadays. Yes, even if one is a few fractions of a second faster than another in a specific benchmark, real world testing won’t show much of a perceptible difference. Quite often, the speed of your Internet connection will have more impact on your actual browsing experience. In saying that, however, I did go away with the feeling that Safari 5 is somewhat faster than its predecessor, and very much on a par with the competition on the Mac and Windows platforms. And, no, I do not regard Internet Explorer — any version — as competition. More and more users are going elsewhere, and the apparent success of Windows 7 hasn’t really helped that much.

I also remain intrigued by the way Apple looks for problems in existing products and devises elegant solutions. If Reader actually makes it easier for you to read the content on a site, we all benefit. In the end, there’s nothing wrong with that.