Apple Continues to Close on Nokia for Title of World's Top Smartphone Vendor

I don't think the WP7 deal will help Nokia much at all. Time will tell but people are already migrating to other manufacturers.

Samsung, HTC & Apple deserve their increases IMO.

my two white iPhone 4's helped this statistic!!! :D :apple:

These are skewed stats. The definition of a "smartphone" has not been consistent. If you can run BREW apps, you are a smartphone -- NOT!!

True, in some ways, the definition of a smartphone is "I know one when I see one" :)

When the iPhone first came out, it was locked down to the apps that it came with. Which, according to the usual definitions at the time, made it a "featurephone".

So it is slightly ironic that a cheap flip phone which can download and use BREW apps, is still considered a "dumbphone".

Interestingly, while Apple has just hit the $2 billion mark in royalties spread out over tens of thousands of developers, BREW apps have hit $3 billion in royalties to far fewer devs.

People talk about the latest app stores, but dumbphones have been a quietly huge app market for a decade. Heck, until lately, even ringtone sales brought in 0.7 billion dollars a year in the US alone.

iPhones are now everywhere in Japan and by extension the whole 'smartphone' market is expanding, with rival carriers releasing as many Android devices as they can build.

Yes, it's amazing that just a year or two ago, there was almost no Android phones in Japan. Now they're everywhere, with TV tuners, etc.

It's true that many people were surprised by the success of the iPhone because they had banked on Japan remaining largely ignorant of any device not developed from within.

And indeed, the iPhone barely sold in Japan until Softbank started offering it for free or nearly so. Then it took off.

Indeed Japan does still pride itself on the many 'Galapagos' devices ie devices that wont work, or be useful outside of Japan.

Right. So the question is, will Japan will go back to mostly buying its own products now that Japanese Android handsets are proliferating.

Every phone is already an iphone.

Some people buy the original iphone

Some buy the iphone copies with different names

And some people are brainwashed.

I hope that someday soon the only phone to be sold will be the iPhone. Can you imagine the great feeling to know that every phone in the world is an iPhone?

Why would you want that? That would kill creativity and you would know longer have the pride of owning a device cooler than most other people's phones

Do Nokia actually produce Smartphones??

Depends what you consider a "Smartphone" to be.

Nokia is raking it in from lower end phones though, but that's not glitzy.