Do you mean the first time he used the word "telephony", or the second time? ;)
This seems to be what he meant the second time. But then what did he mean the first time? What does he think the iPhone should be for, if not for nearly every single thing on his list of up-and-coming technologies?
Meanwhile, I can respect the argument that the iPhone's app store is so crowded or so oddly designed that no matter how good your app is it's unlikely to find an audience. And I can respect the argument that, in many cases, something like Android is a better choice of platform than iPhone because Apple might veto you at various points. These, however, are not arguments that were made by the original submitter.
And I have very little sympathy for the "oh, it's just a passing fad" argument. Our entire field may be a passing fad, every existing mobile platform is a passing fad, people used to claim that the web was a passing fad, and my entire life is, if not a fad, quite definitely passing. If you want to experiment with a portable, location-specific app that has an alternative interface, what should you do? Deploy on a platform with no installed base and make all three of your users very happy? Raise N million dollars to market the thing that you stapled together in your basement, taking on an enormous risk? Sit around theorizing until the perfect platform with a perfectly-sized userbase with perfect demographics is presented to you by your fairy godmother?
Certainly a platform that sits squarely in the middle of your vision for the future of technology shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It might even be worth working with for a while. Technology careers are all about brachiation: You stick with one thing long enough to spy something else to grab onto.