iPhone vs the Mobile industry

Back when the iPhone came out, while secretly wanting one (until I saw in person how bulky the 1g was), I did not think that they would have as big market penetration as it did.

The odds were against it I thought. An expensive phone which was carried by 1 carrier?!?

It was not that simple. With great marketing from Apple that made everyone want one before they even saw one and no real competition, people changed carriers (those who were not with AT&T) and forked out the cash during a declining economy.

Why was it so easy? No real competition.

- A few manufacturers had touch screen phones, but they were all very slow, and few (if any?) were offered by US carriers.
- I cant recall seeing any marketing as for a smart phone as I did for the iPhone. Great marketing efforts.
- A good app store and good apps. As one of my friends @browntown always says, the great thing about the iphone is the apps.
- A good music store.

What really happened?
Even with all this, Nokia remained king of the market share, RIM remained second, and the Apple with its iPhone only really beat out HTC and some other smaller players. If you take steps back and look at cell phone distribution in general. Apple did not make much/any impact globally.

The other interesting point to note is when Nokia introduced the 5800 it managed to grow its deciding market share. The Nokia 5800 is not a phone I'd put up against the iPhone as far as usability. It lacked a music store (in the US), great apps, and its really just a Symbian OS phone with a touch screen. Nothing really ground breaking. Despite this it did grow Nokia's part of the smartphone market.

And now?

The Linux based Android is slowly gaining steam, its on a bundle of phones and will probably become the dominant OS by outside of what Nokia/Apple/RIM put on their phones.

Nokia is about to release the n900 - this looks very promising. It looks like Nokia is going a totally different direction than everyone else who has been playing catchup with the iphones technology/usability. Nokia is taking a few steps forward of everyone else and will be setting the first benchmarks of having a mobile computer with cell phone capabilities and size.

The n800 uses the Linux based Maemo OS. In a sense you have the flexibility of a laptop that fits in your pocket and is integrated as a cell phone. You also have a huge open source app developing user base just like Android does.

Gartner Worldwide analyst Roberta Cozza said:

“Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, based in Egham, UK. “’Touch for the sake of touch’ was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market.”

The key there I believe is tighter integration with applications and services.

What will happen next.

I believe there will be no single device that has a huge impact against the iPhone and its success, but I do believe that unless apple has something up its sleeve it will slowly loose the majority of market share to both Googles Andriod which will be the standard non-Nokia smart phone OS, and Nokia's Maemo.

RIM? Did I leave them out? Well RIM does have a major market share next to Nokia right now, but I just don't believe they will sustain it. I believe the business suitability of Maemo and Android will phase them out of the picture completely (unless they jump on the Android bandwagon)

So infact the underdog of the OS world. Linux will be the on the majority of mobile devices, just people wont know it. As a Linux enthusiastic since '96 this gets my vote :)