Influencer or the King

It is a paradigm change. It's hype with little relevance. It's the future. It's US-centric obsolete technology that the rest of the world has gone past...

The above are some of the comments associated with the iPhone. Which of the above are true? All of them? None of them?

Does the iPhone represent a minority viewpoint (US / IT press) or is it a trend of things to come?

iPhone has been a game-changer with innovations including:

• Native applications that are custom built to take advantage of the platform capabilities (Gartenberg's comments, analyst with Interpret)
• Smartphone platform (App store and iPhone SDK) being an integral enabler of the smartphone value
• Device that lends itself into app download and mobile browsing. Though iPhone has about 10% of the smartphone marketshare, it commands a disproportionate 32% of mobile internet market share (Source: Admob). Nokia has 40% market share of mobile devices and a similar share of the mobile internet market.
  
• Did Apple open the pandora's box with their App Store. Though we've had 1.5 billion downloads to-date, Juniper predicts that the industry would reach an annual 20 billion app downloads per year by 2014! (Source: Juniper Research and Mobile Innovation)
  

On the other hand, iPhone is a footnote in many international markets for some of these reasons:

• Would an audience used to cutting-edge hardware, such as, 12 Megapixel camera, settle for the 3 Megapixels that iPhone offers?
• Would the global market place used to variety of smart phones to select from settle for a model-of-the-year offering from iPhone?
• Can the tail wag the dog? Can US consumers with only 8% of smart phone market share or iPhone with 10% global market share challenge the market leader Nokia
  

Apple and iPhone are today's shiny toys. The question is whether they will continue to change the nature of the smart phone market place while lingering in the back, or will they mount an attack and displace the leader Nokia?

What are your thoughts?