And of course there is abit of a gold rush going on in the app store, developers scrambling to write apps to cash in, which fuels more consumers buying because of the diverse range of apps available.

I also dont subscribe to the ‘not suitable for corporate use’, its ships with cisco vpn which is the preferred choice of many medium and large scale organisations which means you can get onto corporate networks.

I have had mine a year and I am still not bored of it, it is light years ahead of any phone that existed before and exists now.

Gary

The iPhone does not have to win in marketshare. The iPhone just has to be profitable. Apple’s mantra is profit. As a shareholder, I applaud this. Thus, Apple would be content with snagging 2 percent of the cell phone market – yet having a larger profit than Nokia or RIM or Microsoft or Motorola, etc. etc.

Competition is great. Apple welcomes it. All Apple has to do is make the greatest products it can for itself. Then the world will follow it. One cannot say Apple has a monopoly when it has so much competition.

If the iPhone ecosystem is so closed, how did all those apps and hardware accessories get into it?

Developers live with the restrictions, but the restrictions exist.

Tim

As the number of people on Earth grows, the more females (and males) we’ll have. I have no doubt that the iPhone has weaknesses that can be exploited by the competition. Growing in importance isn’t one of them.

If the iPhone ecosystem is so closed, how did all those apps and hardware accessories get into it?

I’m not quite sure I follow this one – with the entry point of the iPhone at $99 and the contract-less iPod Touch at $199, that’s not exactly premium.

The price with contract is meaningless. The iPhone is very expensive, certainly here in the UK and everywhere else that I’ve seen.

Tim

It was one of the things drummed into me in the business and marketing courses I’ve done.

A consumer will repeatedly buy an “average” product, provided they get what they expect and consider it value. If they get good coffee one day and a great one the next, they’d even switch to a place that consistently makes good coffee because they know what they’ll get.

I’ve also heard of studies where customers will leave a store if faced with too many options. Give them less options, less information and they’re more likely to make a purchase. To much choice and they’re too easily overwhelmed. I’ve even noticed myself doing this.

Personally, I think Android will lose people on the myriad of options and the inconsistency of the interface and platform. It’s up to each phone developer which version of Android they use, how they skin it and the apps people develop may not even be compatible across all Android versions and/or phones.

If Google want it to be a success, they really need to dictate the look, feel and the Android version installed on all phones so that all apps work identically across all Android phones. If they don’t do this, they don’t have a “brand” to speak of.

When just looking at the figures for SmartPhones, the role of the iPod Touch is overlooked.For many a cheap basic phone + iPod Touch = SmartPhone.So we need to add in the iTouch figures to see the platform’s true strength, which by my reckoning is now over 60 million. No other platform offers developers that large a target.

Worldwide the Android numbers will look great over the next 1-2 years with the take up by the major Chinese networks. This however isn’t a market for most western developers. Still Android looks good for second place in the US consumer market after its tie-up with Verizon but it is way behind the iPhone in what it offers for the corporate marketplace.

While RIM should continue to dominate the messaging market, there are too many businessmen with iPhones for Apple not to make inroads in the corporate market. So the battle there is now for third place. Palm with the iTunes sync fiasco has killed its chance (discussed in more detail in http://lowendmac.com/nash/09tn/palm-cuts-off-business.html)and Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t competitive. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for Nokia’s Maemo to establish itself, particularly in niche markets.

I’m not quite sure I follow this one – with the entry point of the iPhone at $99 and the contract-less iPod Touch at $199, that’s not exactly premium. Also, if you look back on the evolution of the iPod itself, those pricing tiers steadily dropped over the years.

“If you look at today’s iPod touch, for example, compared to the first iPods, there are huge differences.”

If we’re talking about the original iPod, the one that started it all, then yes, there are huge differences. However, Apple steadily added and refined the iPod with each generation – and brought their userbase along and grew it – until they did something truly different in the iPod Touch. However, the key here is that the new iPod Touch is MORE consistent – with the iPhone. The capabilities of it have steadily been narrowing with its 3G sibling, and I expect that trend to continue (shame about no camera in the latest revision, though). So we’ll see the iPhone/iPod touch platform homogenize more.

Android suffers from major lack of consistency already, and not just in phone featuresets, but phones shipping different libraries, interfaces, versions – it’s just like Linux (suprise!) but without the package management. Rather than have a unified vision and design requirements, Android is more like a collection of bits Google has tossed out there for manufacturers to make what they will of it. It may end up in more places, but it won’t be a strong platform like the iPhone. It will sweep up the niches, but not the mainstream.