by Matt Fryy

Created on: November 02, 2009

The 'iPhone killer' theory has existed almost as long as the iPhone itself, from the first rumour of a 'Google phone' to the brand-spanking new 'Droid', the idea of a second party taking the iPhone, and undercutting it with an open operating system and all the specs' fanboys dream of, is enough to excite most tech-heads. But will one of these copycats inevitably take a bite of and spit out the big A?

The fact that all these devices are more or less based on the iPhone is not a point that should be overlooked, sure Nokia and the likes have had stabs at suing Apple over different technologies that they developed first blah-blah, but even those same big-shot CEOs have admitted the application of these technologies into this next-generation device is incredible, years ahead of what any other company was planning.

The fact that the iPhone is still the institutional device that it was when it first launched is pretty amazing. Much of this being Apple's role in stepping up software (and to some extent hardware) as the competition has developed and as consumers grow more demanding. As a result, a kind of cat and mouse Smartphone chase has been in play which has seen each company attempt to replicate the iPhone with a design tweak here and a spec tweak there, but really we all know who started this game, and thus who will undoubtedly finish it.

I could sit here all day and argue each head-turning feature of the iPhone against it's competitors, but by now we've all had a green-eyed pinch, scroll and play with the incredible software which renders most current competition pretty low when it comes to user experience. The real argument here is; will the premium product become the underdog to Androids cheaper, better equipped phones? Well this is just it, the iPhone is a premium product.

The fanboy mentality 'I'll buy almost anything shiny & made by Apple' has a little more sense than the phrase connotes. All of Apple's products are and always will be well made, high-end devices, from the iPod to the Mac to the iPhone, you just know there's going to be a price to pay for silicon of this standard. The high-end high-price of Apple's products is half of what makes them so desirable, so having a cheaper smartphone competitor is not necessarily going to put the iPhone in hot water. The only logical factor that any company could single out and indeed overtake on is hardware specifications in the way of megapixels, mhz, and memory.

But I bid you this, is there any point in having brawn without beauty? 30 million users think not.

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