More useful like all their GUI competition before they finally did it right with OSX. Or many of the Symbian based phones.
Part of the smartphone growth now is they’re all smart. Tried buying a non-smart cellphone lately? Heck even $20 disposable trackfons can browse the freaking web now. But the high end of the smarts still aren’t that big, iPhone is at under 5% of the handheld market.
I didn’t say their weren’t knockoffs, but look at the phones actually doing well in the market vs the iPhone. You’ve got a lot of mini-keyboards a lack of touchscreens. And a lot of the tablet competition is avoiding it too. You’re suffering from confirmation bias, only paying attention to the stuff that looks like Apple. I’m probably suffering from it too since “looks like Apple” means touchscreen and I won’t buy stuff with touchscreens. There’s plenty of “doesn’t look anything like Apple” out there.
There are LOTS of non-smart phones out there that don't require a data plan. You just have not looked. The ability to get on the internet is NOT the defining ability of a smartphone. Feature phones have been able to do that for a long time...
But the high end of the smarts still aren’t that big, iPhone is at under 5% of the handheld market.
You are wrong in your "under 5%" of the handheld market. In the 4th Quarter of 2011, Apple's world wide share of ALL phones, smart and non-smart was 8.7%... and it has climbed since then. In the last quarter, Nokia was knocked out of 1st place... and Apple has climbed. It is over 9% but less than 10%. Your figure was accurate in the last quarter of 2010... way out of date for a company growing now at a 120% year over year average rate each quarter.
I'm a little confused by this. We were talking about a more-useful alternative that pre-dated, and was outsold by, Apple's version. "all their GUI competition" didn't pre-date the classic MacOS.
Or many of the Symbian based phones.
Are you arguing that many Symbian phones were more useful than the iPhone?
Part of the smartphone growth now is they’re all smart. Tried buying a non-smart cellphone lately?
I count five from AT&T, half a dozen each from Sprint and Verizon, and a couple from T-Mobile. The line between a "smartphone" and a "feature phone" can get a bit blurry, and I think that a lot of what you're calling smartphones are what I -- and the people who compile the sales statistics -- would call feature phones.
Heck even $20 disposable trackfons can browse the freaking web now.
If you're talking about the kind of WAP browser I had on my Qualcomm phone back in 1999, sure. A usable HTML browser, not so much. I don't think that $20 Tracfone is included in the analysts' smartphone figures.
I didn’t say their weren’t knockoffs, but look at the phones actually doing well in the market vs the iPhone. You’ve got a lot of mini-keyboards a lack of touchscreens.
Assuming we're talking about actual smartphones and not feature phones, those are called Blackberries. Don't ask how that company is doing. Other than Blackberry, I counted maybe ten models with a physical keyboard, some of which were old, discontinued models (Palm Pixi? Really?). Maybe four of five of those lacked touch screens. Sure, those phones still exist; so do computers that boot to a command line. So do horses. They're not driving the market.
Look at the Web sites for the carriers. Look on the shelves at their retail stores, or at Best Buy or Radio Shack. Five years ago, you would have seen flip phones galore, with one or two smartphones tucked back in the corner. Now, the ratio is reversed. That is creating a market.