“When the iPhone came out, it was so far beyond what was out there on the market, pretty much up until now,” said Edward Zabitsky, analyst with ACI Research. “But with what’s coming out from competitors, that advantage is going away. For the first time, Apple’s going to be faced with a serious growth challenge.”
via Apple: 123% surge in iPhone sales - Apr. 22, 2009 .
Yeah, the gizmos coming out from competitors are going to kill Apple, since Apple hasn’t been working on anything new.
The analyst started off on the right track: the iPhone was indeed way ahead of the pack. A year later, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G and, more importantly, the App Store. Which put Apple even farther ahead of the pack (don’t underestimate the power that the App Store gives Apple for the time being!). At this point, we already know that iPhone OS 3.0 is coming out the summer with more goodies, and it would be fair to guess that Apple is not sitting around letting the iPhone hardware languish.
Perhaps the iPhone 3G’s advantage is going away, but I sincerely doubt this will be the year that the iPhone starts to fall.