" unit sales of iPods were up only 5%" Yes, but more expensive iPods (Touch) means revenue up 17%. Also, should not iPhone sales (also iPods) be considered in numbers? iPod Market saturated? Remember the 3-year consumer replacement cycle. Apple stores are on fire, opening Flagship stores in Australia and China. Apple is expanding steadily into foreign markets...remember the iPod takeoff in the US?

The Apple guidence was down 27% for first quarter, but Apple for years has issued guidence numbers down 25% for the quarter after the "Christmas" quarter, so this was a massive overreaction due to fear and economic pessimism by the market.

All products in the Apple ecosystem are positioned for strong growth and steady breakout in foreign markets. Hold your stock for long term investment profits.

If this is how the market values Apple's success, imagine the ride for other tech stocks...especially those who are riding now crumbling old business models and changes to their traditional revenue streams. There will be much blood in the water.

Why are Steve Jobs/Apple seemingly the only ones who can predict digital convergence as it affects business models? Apple is playing a deadly game of chess, disrupting and exposing existing business models as obsolete.

If it weren't so tragic for many employees, it would be funny to watch the established and outdated competitors struggle to compete so ineptly...playing copy and catch-up while Apple surges and leapfrogs ahead.

Apple adding revenue to carriers due to data use?

Hardly...Apple is responsible for the trend to "unlimited" data plans as opposed to the item-by-item or usage level charges that the carriers were trying to impose.

Further, the iPhone implications...inevitable "Web" texting, instant message, social networking, and even VOIP through the browser...threatens the existing revenue streams of the carriers.

Despite the contract provisions of "protecting" the closed garden restriction of carriers, that Apple had to agree to in order to convince a carrier (AT&T) for introduction of the iPhone...Apple (and Jobs) knows that the future is open networks, unlocked phones and the disruption of the carrier's present restrictive and locked business models.

I personally doubt the 3G-Vodaphone rumor.

It doesn't make sense. Vodaphone would not have launched their legal battle if they were themselves negotiating an "exclusive" deal. It doesn't make sense for Apple to ignore (betray?) their "first" iphone partners. Apple is not stupid enough to ignite massive legal problems and poison thier relationships with other carriers, by trying to claim the G3iPhone is not the "iPhone".

..."before someone in Apple decided to go corporate-fascist and spend extra time and resources to REMOVE or INHIBIT a lot of this functionality from the factory-stock device."

Wait just a cotton-picking minute. First everyone criticises the iPhone because it is "not revolutionary" because every feature already exists in other phones and other phones can do everything the iPhone can...

So why didn't the others bring us the capabilities of the iPhone? And why is there not a chorus of people calling Nokia, Samsung, Sony, ATT, etc...a bunch of corporate-fascists??????????

These wide-open competitive analyses are all based on Apple intending to penetrate and overwhelm the cellphone market. The cellphone is much bigger and more international than the computer market.

Steve Jobs announced his long range goals in January...to capture "1%" of the cellphone market, which is around 5% of the smartphone market.

Nothing I have seen indicates that Apple is doing anything other than their normal market strategy...to capture a significant minority of the fashionable and elitest high-end portion of the market. I don't think Apple has any designs on the "free", cheap, and lowend segments of the cellphone market...and that is the vast bulk of the market. Apple consistently aims at the affluent, pricy and high-profit segments with their products. Apple would be overjoyed, and their stock soaring through the roof, announcing record profits, if they captured anything near 3% of the market and 10$ of the smartphone market...and that would translate into sales by the end of 2008 of about 20 million iPhones. That's Apples kind of market. If the iPhone were ever to become "free"...then by then Apple would be selling a much more advanced product for $599 (or more). Remember people in Europe and Asia are used to using smartphones that cost around $1,000. Why give away the iPhone for free?

As I read the patent digest, a report to Apple of theft would generate a signal from Apple to the iPhone circuitry to prevent ANY further recharging of the internal battery, as an anti-use-after-theft device. Thus the enclosed and soldered battery, as otherwise someone could just insert a replacement charged battery. Made sense to me, since Apple did not have the remote-erase capabilty of the Blackberry.

My sincere sympathy for the Canucks.

Skype Voip is already available for the iPhone and others are coming. The future of broadband is Wifi and WiMax and ultimately the carriers will become, as Steve Jobs states, "mere portals".

The price of an iPhone justifies its value as the best iPod ever, plus PDA and Web Browser over wifi...just carry a cheap cell phone with you, until wifi becomes more and more universal. In this, the iPhone is helping to bust the oligopolistic carriers.

As the Apple iphone introduction and marketing proceeds...and on to Europe and then Asia; criticisms are made and answered; and new apps are announced...I am amazed at the effectivness of Apple's strategy.

The realization and fear (and FUD) from MS's mobile platform and formats; phone makers; carriers; and core developers is amazing. Steve Jobs has, in a sense, declared war on the oligarchy's holding back the US mobile market...but so far...so good.

What interesting times we live in.

The Techno-nerds constantly claim that "Apple didn't do it first" and "my smartphone can also do that".

What they don't understand is that Apples fortes are enabling the difficult "for the rest of us", so that we can easily and intuitively do what we want, without mastering a device with ten times as many features that we will never use...and constantly referring to thick and arcane manuals.

It's about ease of use and "empowerment" of ordinary people...something at which the other smartphones failed miserably.