I was watching Chuck last night, and just like every episode recently aired I noticed there were many iPads and iPhones around. I don’t know if this is a trend amongst producers or Apple paying for product placement, but the thing is - Apple products are everywhere in today’s TV shows. I’m referring to “TV shows” as it’s the only kind of content coming from television networks I regularly consume nowadays.

So while I was watching and yet another iPhone showed up, my girlfriend - who is not exactly a “tech savvy” type - said: “Look, another iPhone 4”. The same happens every single time in the other shows we follow.

I also noticed, though, that there are other kinds of gadgets showing up every once in a while, namely non-Apple cellphones. They’re usually Motorola, HTC, Samsung Galaxy devices (I also spotted a Nexus One on Chuck) running, as you may guess, Android. I know those are Android devices, and when I see them I usually whisper “look, that’s an Android phone”. But I know those are Android devices, because I’m a geek who’s interested in technology and reads dozens of tech blogs every day. Do regular people notice these products at all?

See, it’s not really about “tv shows” or “Chuck” or “Apple has money and pays for product placement”. It’s about the fragmentation issue everyone on the internet has been talking about (even Steve Jobs himself did at Apple’s Q4 earnings call) and people’s perception of these gadgets shown on TV.

So I did a little research myself, and when I was hanging out at the pub with my friends a few days ago I casually said: “Hey, you guys noticed all those iPhones on Chuck?” (again, Chuck’s just an example). They said yeah, they all noticed iPhones and iPads (and MacBooks, too, sometimes) in the recent episodes of the TV shows they followed. But they didn’t mention a Nexus One, a Galaxy S, a G2 - they didn’t mention Android at all. They just said: “Apple’s stuff is everywhere these days.”

True, and that’s because it’s trendy. We, geeks, love iOS’ UI and App Store, but most of the iPhone customers - those who generate 14 million sales in the fourth quarter of 2010 - buy an iPhone because it’s an iPhone. Most people I know bought an iPhone 4 because they heard it was a great update, and well, because it was an iPhone. So ok, the iPhone is doing great and we’re all happy, bla bla bla.

But the real turning point has been in people’s perception of the iPhone. The second they see its particular shape, screen and home button, the moment they see the popular phone interface on screen they say “Hey, that’s an iPhone!”. It’s immediately recognizable.

The same can’t be said about Android. Perhaps “my friends” is not exactly the userbase Nielsen would like to focus his next research on, but I do believe this issue is very common. And being television the most popular type of media that enters people’s home every day, the TV show example is noteworthy. For common people (a term that, for all intents and purposes, I dislike but I can’t refer to them as “geeks”) Android is a non-brand. The large majority of consumers won’t be able to spot a device running Android at first sight.

But you can’t do that with a PC either, right? Windows runs on a multitude of different machines, doesn’t it? Good argument. So let me rephrase: the large majority of consumers will simply know that that thin, flat cellphone they see on screen it’s an iPhone.