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Matias explains further, “Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. We need to build not just the product, but even more than the product, the building blocks so that people stop doing silly things like taking a phone UI and stretching it out to a 10-inch tablet.” It’s obvious that products like the original Galaxy Tab, with a bastardized version of Android for phones, annoyed him.

“So that was the mission, and it was a time-boxed mission. Any corner we could cut to get that thing out the door, we had to.”

“I don’t think anybody ever asked about the soul,” he answers in a very matter-of-fact way, “This was my question, it was the question I challenged the team with.”

“I think people had very clear and concrete visions about Android and its strategy, but from a holistic design perspective — not just the look and feel — what does it mean in your life? Why are we doing the things that we’re trying to do. That was the question I wanted to ask.”

“A lot of what we found confirmed what I thought for years. At Danger, we had this idea that smartphones were not for a certain kind of person. They were for everyone. Smartphones were the way phones were supposed to be.”

“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love these things [smartphones], they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”

He’s on a roll now. Clearly Matias has spent a lot of time thinking about what he doesn’t like. “If you look back at the web, people did the same thing. All these cartoony things hanging off a page. If you tried that today, people would be laughing, unless you were doing it in a kitsch, poking-fun-at-yourself, retro art way.”

But what about Microsoft and their “authentically digital” design? “The problem with going too starkly systematic, forcing everything into this completely constrained, modernist palette, for both of them, you’re not leaving any room for the content to express itself.”

“The incredible diversity of applications and content providers… that’s the reason people have these machines. Not for the five bundled apps and the beauty of the OS — they have them for the hundreds or thousands of games, or books, or movies.”

“I came here because they’re winning, but also because I could not stand the thought of there being another decade of being trapped in one paradigm, of being trapped in the past just because somebody manages to grab maximum marketshare, and then that’s the thing everybody uses with incremental evolution.”

“I thought ‘okay you know what, I’ve tried to win so many times before,’ and it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter how great a product you have and how revolutionary the product is… distribution and marketshare are the things that matter.” Matias smiles, “Now I’m going the other way around.”