I'm going to make a bold prediction: Apple's iPhone will lose the mobile device wars. Such statement will send some iPhone fans howling -- perhaps appropriately so with the full moon days passed and Halloween days away. :)

Put another way: iPhone is to Android -- and somewhat Symbian OS -- handsets as Macintosh was to the DOS/Windows PC in the 1980s and 1990s. The Mac's rocky start in 1984-85 gave way to great success because of several killer applications, with desktop publishing being among the most important. But by the mid 1990s, Windows PCs pushed down Mac market share. The iPhone is poised to track similarly. Gartner predicts that Android OS shipments will exceed iPhone OS by 2012 (see chart). I'm a believer.

My take: One it's artificial to call these things smartphones, inasmuch as the same platform runs iPhone and iPod Touch, the latter 20M units that Gartner doesn't count because it's not a "smartphone" (i.e., a full 40% of the units not counted). When Apple's Tablet comes out, it will also run same software, leverage/feed the same ecosystem, and Gartner won't count that to the total. Call it a mobile computing device and the analysis looks radically different.

Two, the article seems tilted to Units over Margins/Profits, pre-supposing that the former is the end-all be all, which Nokia suggests aint so (they have the units but not the profits or the mindshare).

Three, a core pre-supposition is that Apple won't win because of something endemic to Apple (premium pricing, proprietary-ness, vertical orientation). While the Windows v. Mac analog provides convenient historical symmetry, I would argue that the key deviations are that Apple is actually the one playing the platform game this go around (and and making their ecosystem successful to boot), all the while building leverage across products (Mac, iTunes, etc.) and avoiding falling prey to the pricing overhang (e.g., $99 3G) that was core to their undoing in PC Wars.

Some fodder for why piecemeal solutions don't work for mobile in my post:

iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts
http://bit.ly/1rz7y7

Check it out.