Business Week investigates what the iPhone’s impact is going to be on rival high-end phone makers like RIM, Palm, Nokia, etc. I’ll save you the read – the answer is summed up in the image to the right.
It’s true, Apple only sold 6 million iPhones in its first year, out of a billion or so handsets sold worldwide. But remember that they are currently available in only a couple of countries. And in the U.S., they’ve grabbed a 25+% share of the smart phone market. And that was with a slow, no-GPS, expensive device (here’s our side-by-side comparison of the iPhone v. the RIM Blackberry 8820 from a year ago).
Imagine the havoc they will wreak with the twice-as-fast, half-as-expensive, GPS-enabled, Exchange-supported 3G iPhone that they’ll unleash on 22 countries this year.
In short, it must be really unpleasant to be in this business and not be Apple right now.