^^^^ I think what gave Apple an advantage is that they are both a hardware AND a software company.

I have always been a phone whore, I upgrade once a year at most. For years phones have gotten more and more advanced, and less and less usable. I remember with my last phone (Samsung Blackjack II) that I actually started to wish that I could go back in time and get an old Moto Startac. Most phones are a pain in the ass to use, with buried features and require menu navigation to make a call. Add to that slow Java ME, and laggy interfaces and you pretty much have the smartphone of 2006.

What Apple did was sit down and fundamentally re-assess what a phone UI needs to do. They didn't ace it, but they did a darn good job.

The other thing hits on the point you made about the SDK. It is not only simple and polished, but well documented. Symbian is notorious because of how many HW configs, and stupid carrier inserted BS, so coding has to try and work around that. Apple used API's that Mac developers are familiar with and non-Mac devs can learn easily. Heck even I with my limited Obj-C experience can create simple iApps. Pricing the dev-kits low was another solid move. Using things like Open-GL and native compilers has also allowed far better access to that hardware.

Perhaps the best thing Apple did was rip itself clear from the carrier. At&t has almost no say in what apps Apple allows. That alone has opened the door to tons more software and a huge ecosystem.

that would be like sony counting all the playstation brand as one because they play ps1 games all of them.

iphone = cell phone can only be compared to phones.

and it have sold 17 million until now, not bad, but not as great compared to other smartphones especially nokia's or samsung.

btw: symbian foundation is free, SDK Are free. and hold more then 50% of the smartphone marketshare.

Not exactly. There's no killzone 2 for ps1, but whatever game is made now works on both iPhones and the iPod Touch.

And yeah, unified hardware has made this possible. I've heard symbian developers bitch for years at Nokia's hardware diversity.

That's pretty decent numbers, I can see why it's starting to get support from quite a few devs

applications are standarize though something that run in the symbian 3rd will run on symbian 5 and so on, and nokia been using the same ti omap 2 and freescale chips for a while.

they have it easy compared to windows mobile thousand configurations.

A couple of quick things. First off Symbian is down to about 43% they have lost almost 10% of their share in the last year, mostly to Apple and RIM (Blackberry). Again they don't have a worldwide presence anymore since they virtually pulled out of the Americas a few years about. No presence in the US or Japan = no serious dev support. Secondly many Nokia's still only run Java applets even some of the lower level "smartphones".

I think the problem with the way you are looking at this is that you are looking at units shipped, not whether people actually use the functions of the phone. Let me give you a quote to illustrate my point:

-ComScore's report, cited by InformationWeek, said that just 3.8% of mobile subscribers have downloaded a game to their mobile phone, compared to 32.4% of iPhone users. 

Here is an illustration showing the mobile web browsing marketshare from last month

The very reliable Net Applications composed it it does NOT include Touch numbers. To put this into context the iPhone makes about almost .50% of web queries. That is insane considering it is only one device vs. every computer/cell/pda currently on the net.

What I draw from this is that many people buy a Samsung or a Nokia and then never download software or use its advanced features. The iPhone on the other hand seems to be used a lot more to its fullest (gaming, web, ect).

This is why while install base is a decent metric in some cases, it fails miserably here. 

This may be the only credible competition to Nintendo in the handheld space.

ehh. i actually expected more out of the itouch..

That internet number blows my mind. I've heard people say that the big deal with the iPhone is that it made the internet usable on a mobile, but damn!

I don't know how the situation has changed since then, but a few years back one of the founders of Sumea gave a guest lecture for a course I did, and he said that configuration management was a full time job for one person for them, and he specifically said that although things may seem easy on the outside, it's a very difficult and complex job to actually manage all that. Another thing he said was how difficult it is to get their software accepted by carriers, basically you need some credentials or they won't spare you their time. Contrast this with Apple and you've got minimum hassle with configurations, no barrier of entry AND you have a channel to distribute updates pretty much automatically. There's just no comparison to what Nokia offers. And this is coming from a Finnish guy who's been using Nokia phones pretty much since they started making cell phones, my first was a Nokia 2110. I wish Nokia could make things as simple as Apple has done, but they've been primarily a HW company for so long that it's taking a lot of time and effort to get the ball running on the SW side properly.