I thought this was a pretty ineresting, if brief, article about Nokia's strategy with the N900 and Maemo and why the iPhone is such a formidable opponent:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...110_524881.htm

It makes two significant points, that I think counters some arguments I frequently read in this forum.

1) The article points out that Apple now makes more money on mobile phones than Nokia, 1.6 billion for Apple in the 3rd Quarter of 2009, 1.1 billion for Nokia. I often see people argue against Apple's dominance, by pointing out how Nokia sells so many more handsets than Apple the comparison is ridiculous. Indeed, Nokia sells fifteen times as many handsets. But Apple is running away with the cream of the market, the people who spend the most money on phones. At the end of the day, it's a very small segment of the market that has most of the money. Nokia just can't afford to lose this segment of the market, which has basically already happened. And the growth of Android is only going to compound the problem.

2) The article points out that because of the popularity of the iPhone in the U.S., the U.S. has become the major source of cell phone applications. Hence even though the U.S. has traditionally not been one of the most important cell phone markets, it now has disproportionate influence over the direction cell phone development is heading in. If you want your app market to take off, you need a platform that's popular in the U.S. Again, Android will only compound this problem for Nokia.

Anyway, I am not an iPhone fan, nor a Android fan. But I think the article is interesting just for thinking about the business dynamics. It turns out the dominance of Symbian, in terms of numbers of handsets its running on, and the dominance of Nokia, in terms of numbers of handsets sold, matters less and less. The number that matters is how much profit. And in that domain, the iPhone is king (I predict in the next couple years, Google/Android will overtake Apple).