nothing. not a damn thing. at the end of 2010, more people were using an android device than one running apple's iphone firmware.
a lot of tech/phone geeks are confused. they are conflating too much information thinking that because the iphone is now on verizon, android sales are going to flatline. so at&t smartphones are mostly iphones. i'm not surprised. when you have an exclusive contract with a company that produces one phone a year i would push and feature that phone as well.
keep in mind that there are just about somewhere north of 1 million iphones on t-mobile too, and their android phone sales haven't dropped off any. some were purchased from at&t customers. some were bought directly from apple. it is not an easy thing to do to get it on t-mobile's network, but it is possible. and those who want it bad enough will do whatever it takes to do that. and despite that, android handsets have not dropped off.
what verizon is doing is going for that easy dollar. they know people are frustrated with at&t's network. and they know that there are enough of a cult of mac people that would dump their defective iphone for one that would work properly when you held it naturally. i would bet that most of their iphone buyers are former at&t customers. and if they would be willing to buy a new phone entirely, and in some cases pay the ETF to do it, they would be willing to shell out some serious cash to spend on that precious iphone.
meanwhile it (still) has no 4g antenna. and that's always been verizon's dig at at&t. their network is better. well if they really wanted a phone to blow at&t away on their 4g network, guess what. that's an ANDROID phone. even now with this it still has the inherant CDMA problem of not being able to use voice and data at the same time. i don't see the iphone taking off just because it is on another carrier, this one especially. i also don't think that things are being compared correctly. the real battle is os vs. os. like i said in another post, if apple sold 5 million iphone 4s, lg, sony, samsung, acer, motorola, htc, and dell could sell 1 million of one of their offerings and outsell anything apple could do. apple is going to lose this race to android due to numbers. there is only one piece of phone hardware that runs apple's iphone firmware where there are hundreds of phones that run android. canalys is right when they say fragmentation isn't an issue here. more people are using an android device than they are an iphone device.
apple wouldn't have been in this mess if they produced more than one design of iphone like samsung and their galaxy s line. you don't think an iphone nano or an iphone with a physical keyboard wouldn't have sold? their one phone a year cycle they have locked themselves in and are dedicated to is going to kill them in the long run. android devices are getting better faster with a smaller development cycle than apple and android's software is steadily improving. you could have an iphone available for all 4 carriers and i don't think it would matter much. apple's near insane seek of control of the iphone, even when it is in possession of a customer is going to eventually have them losing the mobile wars.
i say all of this actively using an iphone and an android device. i do have an anti apple bias, but only due to a dissatisfaction of using itunes and the inability to customize the graphical interface of my device without jailbreaking which apple has tried and failed miserably to curb. and i still want the iphone on t-mobile, although i am 99% confident i would never get one. i like my vibrant. i don't need any special software to get it to do what i want it to do. and it doesn't have steve jobs insane control of what i want on it.
