If by 'they' you mean Canalys, then I'm pretty certain that that is precisely what they do.

During my days of travel I'd found my weapons of choise are a Nokia n800 and a small music phone, and maybe in compliment of a PSP.

I have brought an iPhone and a portable DVD player with me and I have not used them at all!

The browser is just not good enough for one hand operation and in general very hard to multitask.

I think dumb music phones have come a long way. Once I upgrade my motorola L7 to a Nokia 5310 then my combo will be perfect for oversea travel.

Take Care!

Whatever7, I know what you mean, but I think the big screen and the fact that you can enlarge the part you need to read and enter text in is a plus. [/COLOR]

3G? no need to wait til the holiday season, i'd bet that it shows itself by summer time.

BTW, I have an iPhone. IMO the browser is not good for fast data retrieval and input. Many mobile sites don't work with the iPhone very well. You have to "enlarge" on every page and that gets old really fast. That browser basically is good at one thing: rendering ad heavy 3-colume style news site.

That's all true of course but there are of lots things we don't know yet, like will iPhone sales be as seasonal as those for iPods:

[INDENT][/INDENT]

(from Wikipedia)

and will the iPhone take off in the rest of the world like it has in the US? My guess on the latter (in Europe anyway) is that 3G is a minimum requirement.

The iPhone itself may divide opinion but there's no questioning its success. According to market watcher Canalys, Apple shipped 2,320,840 iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2007, just beating Motorola, which shipped 2,301,260 smartphones during the period......Those totals give Nokia a marketshare of 52.9 per cent, RIM 11.4 per cent, and both Apple and Motorola have 6.5 per cent.

Focusing on the US market, Apple took a 28 per cent share, behind only RIM, which accounted for 41 per cent of the market. Third-placed Palm took nine per cent of smartphone shipments. All US Windows Mobile devices vendors combined - and that presumably includes Palm's Windows-based Treos - came to 21 per cent, less than the iPhone's share.

Apple performed less well in Europe, notching up fifth place behind Nokia, RIM, HTC and Motorola. But that stil left it ahead of Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Palm, all of whom have been in the smartphone business for some time."[/COLOR]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/06/canalysq407smartphonebiz/

Gotta be a bit embarassing for Mr. Ballmer who I recall barking last January that Apple wouldn’t capture more than two to three percent of the market and described his own Windows Mobile platform as having or soon acquiring 60 to 80% of the smartphone market. Newsflash for Mr. Ballmer. 28 is 33% bigger than 21 and a helluva lot bigger than 2 or 3%. And Apples been able to do this with hardware available on a single carrier....while AT&T is the biggest US carrier, geez, imagine what they will get once there's a SPrint and Verizon model.

Of course none of this really interests me .... it's 2008, it's February and my GSM 650 is three years old today. Does everything I want it to do though frankly I use it less and less for e-mail and web browsing. Though I have used my son's iPhone for both and it is a lot better than on anything else I have used for that, it still pales next to a laptop with full size KB and screen. Joe Rogan and I agree on this point as is very amusingly presented here:

http://www.sho.com/site/schedules/product_page.do?seriesid=0&episodeid=129589

Colligan said end of 2007....then sometime in 2008, The Guardian and other sources said 3rd quarter 2008 at best and I haven't seen anything contrary. I would say that if Palm doesn't deliver for the holiday buying system, they are going to have a hard time recovering any market "mindshare" at all.