Unlike the PC market, which has been severely dominated  by the fashion trend set by Microsoft Windows since  its birth for the following 15 years, most consumer markets enjoy the benefits of free, direct and open competition: car manufacturers compete, motorcycle and  bicycle producers try to win consumers’ attention,  there is a wide choice of refrigerators, televisions and other consumer products  at the market, so multiple vendors of smartphones just keep on a tradition of free competing and fair trade rules.  Everyone is entitled to bring products to the market and find buyers, and if their products are good enough they will definitely become market leaders.

Apple is considered the market leader having presented to the market a range of highly successful devices and having been at the top of the market sales for about 10 years. It has been introducing products and services that no one was able to match. It has showed Microsoft up. The former rival is still not able to catch up with Jobs' products.  Only now there are some gadgets that can effectively compete with the iPod. The iPhone and the iPad follow the same market pattern. Apple has always delivered products  that at the very beginning had no competitors and only some time later there appeared devices that could compete with them, at least in some areas. When iPhone 3GS was ready for the release last year , the Palm Pre, using the webOS platform was also about to be delivered to the market. Many viewed it as  an iPhone killer, as it presented a bunch of features such as web-based multitasking, an inductive power charging slab, a slide out physical keyboard, a removable battery, and LED camera flash. All of these features were definite signs of its superiority to Apple’s device but now Palm Pre has faded into obscurity while Apple has successfully reaped profits from iPhone 3GS sales.

Now the situation is quite similar as many discuss whether some other platform devices such as HTC Sprint EVO 4G or HTC/Google T-Mobile Nexus One or HTC Droid Incredible will pose any threat to  iPhone 4. And it’s quite likely that the end of the story will be completely the same.