The #1, #3, and #4 best-selling smartphones in the US are Blackberries; iPhone #2

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.

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.

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.

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.

whatever happened to Palm?