

The #1, #3, and #4 best-selling smartphones in the US are Blackberries; iPhone #2 - briansmith
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-outsold-by-blackberry-curve-in-us-last-quarter-2009-5

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briansmith
If true, I think we can infer quite a lot from this:

1\. The business market for smartphones is much larger than the consumer
market for smartphones in the US. Yet, the consumer market for phones is much
larger than the business market overall. From there, we can infer that a huge
number of consumers aren't interested enough in smartphones to pay extra for
them.

2\. RIM is absolutely killing the competition in terms of units sold. I read
elsewhere that the Storm sold almost as many units as the iPhone, which means
RIM is selling at least 2x as many units as Apple in the US. I have no idea
about profit margins, though.

3\. It's tough to be #1 in the US at anything if you don't have a single
product available for Verizon customers. Either AT&T will have to pay out the
nose for iPhone exclusivity next year, or the iPhone will be on both AT&T and
Verizon, at least. But, considering they are only on AT&T now, Apple
definitely did very well.

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falsestprophet
Blackberry is killing in the consumer space as well. A lot of younger people
want the physical keyboard for texting.

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RK
It seems that all I ever hear about is the iPhone, but what I see on the
street, especially when traveling, is Blackberrys, so I'm not that surprised
by this data.

I think a lot of average consumers balk at the iPhone price and business users
are already happy with what they had been using.

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pcc
I think your conclusion about business users may actually be inverted in
certain markets.

Eg small business in Canada, pre-iPhone the networks have been smoking us on
data rates on Blackberry/Treo. iPhone has forced this down. (Pre-iPhone my
Treo rate for 8M was pretty similar to my iPhone rate for 2G)

From this perspective the iPhone turned out to be a far more productive small-
business smartphone for me than I expected.

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webwright
The iPhone is really really shitty at doing the one thing it should be great
at-- making phone calls. An iPhone-heavy day in Seattle for me results in 3-7
dropped calls. Seriously.

I dunno whether this is Apple or AT&T-- I assume the latter. Given that I'm at
the end of my contract, I will leap towards the first smartphone I find that
doesn't suck on another network.

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DougBTX
I'm guessing Apple has something in the bag for all those early adopters whose
two year contracts are about to end.

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falsestprophet
So does Palm.

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crescendo
Is this really surprising? Blackberry has been an established market leader in
this domain for years. Apple claiming the #2 spot with a single product in a
2-3 year time frame is pretty amazing, I think.

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vdoma
whatever happened to Palm?

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falsestprophet
The Palm Pre has not been released yet. The word on the street is that it will
be out just before the next iPhone is announced.

