ANALYSTS at the Smartphone Summit in Lost Wages claimed Monday that the fruity theme Iphone has ignited higher sales in the broader smartphone market.

Smartphone sales are growing much faster than the overall cellphone market. The number of people with smartphones doubled in the US within just the last year to 14.6 million, said M:Metrics analyst Mark Donovan.

The analysts seemed fascinated by the Iphone, even though its arguably not really a smartphone, which one of them defined as a device for which third parties can develop applications that users can download and run natively.

Even after applications built using the Iphone SDK appear, its not clear that they'll do more than existing Java applications, which run on simple feature phones, indicated Bill Hughes, an analyst with In-Stat.

More than 188 million Symbian phones have been sold since they were first released. Blackberry combination PDA phones and Windows Mobile devices also qualify as smartphones and have sold in large numbers. In contrast, Jobs' Mob has sold only 3.7 million Iphones, so it's obviously driving the market in a very strange way - from the rear. µ

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