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.
There was quite a bit of GUI competition that predated Mac 1. And some of them were pretty kick butt (DESQView being one of my all time favorites). Add to that the fact that the Mac OS really blew until OSX, and there’s plenty of competition doing stuff well before Apple got around to doing it well.
I’m arguing that Symbian phones were useful. That was your argument that nobody did anything useful in these markets before Apple. Oh and Symbian had a touchscreen in 2000 so the idea that Apple was first to put a touchscreen on a smartphone is wrong.
Browsing the internet on a phone is smart enough. This smart/ feature thing is a distinction without a difference. At best it’s low end high end. If it’s a phone doing a heck of a lot more than making phone calls it’s a smartphone. Maybe not a high end smartphone, but it’s still smart.
There’s plenty of non-blackberries with keyboards.
No that’s not creating a market, that’s GROWTH in a market. The market already existed. There were smartphones before the iPhone, there were touchscreen smartphones before the iPhone, the market existed BEFORE the iPhone. It was smaller, but that’s as much about all the other companies as it is about Apple.