Does any other mobile phone matter?

I met with a friend yesterday who had the T-mobile G1. A great phone with a lot of great features. Because of it's non-proprietary architecture and qwerty keyboard, it could arguably be better than the iPhone.

It's to the iPhone what Microsoft's Zune is to MP3 players. No one that I know admits to having a Zune.

The iPhone wasn't the first data phone. It came into the market carrying the brand affinity of Apple and through superior design and marketing, it has dominated the market. Now with 2.5 million subscribers, the iPhone makes up 50% of all smart phone traffic and 50% operating system share (really share of market) of all cell phones. To put this in perspective, in August of 2008 iPhones only made up 10% of all traffic.

Is this a passing fad? Here's some more numbers. 93 percent of iPhone owners have added an application versus only 66 percent of Smartphone owners. 60 percent of users browse the internet at least once per day Three quarters of users do more web surfing on the iPhone than on their previous device. (pdf)

The G1, Blackberry's new Storm none of these matter. They're all playing catch up. The iPhone is cool because they didn't copy someone elses vision, it came from the inside.  It gets used and, in my opinion, will continue to dominate. No other phone matters.

- Paul Herring