Most consumers/prosumers on the iPhone bandwagon now only need to carry ONE device in their pockets. Before my purchase I was carrying a phone, a cheap Palm (calendaring), and my iPod. Others may have moved from Treo + iPod, or BB + iPod, to simply iPhone (discounting blood loyalties to RIM).

While there are still, what I (and no doubt others) feel little things wrong with some aspects of the iPhone’s user interface, for most of what it does, it does these things very well.

As far as the apps are concerned, I do happen to be a user that does use some apps on a daily basis (though I recognise I am probably in the minority). I have a calorie counting app (I could not have lost the 15kg I did without it’s convenience), and to a lesser extent the Facebook app. Facebook is replaceable across devices (their seems to be a client for anything that is fueled by electrons), but for the time being, I could not lose the other one.

The application marketplace, on the other hand, reinforced by the network effects that drove it, faces no such challenger. Second place, in that arena, is a distant second.

Which is what convinces me that the strongest thing that the iPhone has going for it still is the application catalog, much like the strength of Windows was not the OS but the wealth of third party apps.

then once you buy Apple hardware – iPod, iPhone, AppleTV – iTunes also becomes your single all purpose device-management utility: account management, software updates, backup, content transfer and synching … plus apps.

(not everything is managed via iTunes: iPhoto and Mail handle their categories’ iPhone interface for Mac owners (but not PC’ers who have to manage them via the iPhone instead), and MobileMe is offering additional optional services now too.)

Apple integrates all these iTunes functions so seamlessly with the iPhone that users don’t really think about iTunes after the first time set up at all. they just work on their playlists and buy stuff – both of which are fun – and then play media or use the apps. but under the hood iTunes keeps it all together.

None of the competition has such a comprehensive platform as iTunes for their smartphones. not even close. WinMobile is a mish-mash that MS has never really integrated with all its other products/services/software (they say they will, someday). RIM and Palm have virtually nothing to work with beyond the handsets themselves. Android is trying to put it all in the Google “cloud,” but obviously it can’t match the whole hardware-based iTunes package. Nokia now with Ovi is trying to put all the pieces together with its new “cloud” service, but it too is limited without hardware support and you have to start from scratch, transferring everything you got already into a new Ovi realm – too high a barrier for most (Nokia should have bought Yahoo instead, the dummies, to quickly catch up at least with Android/Google).

so when you boil it all down, it is really iTunes that is the secret of the iPhone’s success, as it was for the iPod before it. it’s the platform that matters.

I have a lot of trouble imagining someone non-technical like my wife justifying her next iPhone purchase based on the app store rather than the ease of email and web access, the fact that it’s pretty, ease of use and the iPod and iPhoto features. The only third party app of any significance would be an MSN or Skype client and I have no doubt competing mobile phones would have one of those on offer.