The iPhone is an incredibly impressive device. Much how the Blackberry put email access into your pocket, the iPhone has provided the first usable mobile browsing experience. As the first mover in the space, Apple exercises a near monopoly in the space with an impressive 40% market share in mobile internet traffic. Kudos to everyone involved in the effort at Apple for setting a high bar for any potential competitor.
Some would put Apple’s early success in historic terms, claiming the iPhone has the fastest user growth in tech history. That is taking it a bit too far.
You have to do two things to reach that conclusion. The first is to combine iPhone device shipments with iPod Touch shipments, which gets you 60 million units. The actual iPhone number is 33 million units. Although the iPod Touch runs the same OS as the iPhone, I wouldn’t combine the two numbers together. Touch numbers are artificially inflated by the massive number that was given away with Mac purchases, and compete in a very different product segment (mobile phones versus gaming). I don’t consider my Tivo and Netbook similar products either (they both run on Linux).
Second, you have to ignore a slew of other products. Just three years ago, the Motorola Razr moved 50 million units in even less time (eventually selling 110 million units). For true market dominance, take a look at Sony’s Walkman which eventually moved over 300 million units. The point is that in historic terms, the iPhone launch wasn’t particularly historic, even within the mobile phone category.
So the iPhone currently dominates the web-browsing mobile phone space. If history is a guide, someone will come out with a better phone that will force you to throw it in the same drawer as your Motorola Razr. Colin Gibbs seems to think that it will happen this holiday season. The iPhone developers I talk to have already started switching to the Android platform. I don’t know if Android is the answer to the iPhone, but definitely know it’s possible.
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