I keep hearing about iPhone killers, just as I kept hearing about iPod killers back in the day. Guess what? The iPod never got killed, and - judging by what I see now, over a year after the introduction of the first iPhone - my estimate is that there will be no iPhone killers anytime soon.
Lets put the platform and even the features aside for a moment. I'm talking about the user interface. Ever wonder how Apple manages to create the perfect UI for all their portable consumer electronics devices - so perfect that other companies have no choice but to merely try to make a good copy? I don't know what they put in the water over there at Apple HQ, but I know that whoever designs these things should be awarded the Nobel prize for UI design.
First, it was the iPod scroll wheel. No matter how much other manufacturers of audio players tried, they could never replicate the perfect simplicity of this user interface. In time, there were two kinds of audio devices on the market - "iPods", and "audio players with very complicated navigation system". It's not the only or maybe even the main reason for iPod's popularity, but it sure as hell helped.
It's happening again with the iPhone. I present to you exhibit A: an image of iPhone and several of its big competitors; iPhone "killers" if you will.
It's not hard to notice that all of these phones have essentially the same navigation. But if you can reach back in your mind to the pre-iPhone time, you'll remember that four main icons for navigation and several rows of icons for applications is not some universal navigation standard for smartphones. Apple engineers created it, and it already seems so natural that other companies have more or less "adopted" it for their own products.
However, just as no other company managed to create a better iPod wheel, I sincerely doubt that they'll manage to create a better touch screen navigation system than the one iPhone has. I've tried Samsung's F700 and I can testify that while it does have a touch screen and it even improves on the iPhone's with haptic feedback, the overall experience is just not fluid enough and it feels like a distant shadow of the iPhone interface. Same goes for HTC Touch. Since the iPhone has been on the market for well over a year now, and the competitors haven't been able to offer anything that feels better than a cheap knockoff, I can only conclude that the iPod wheel story will repeat itself; there will always be one iPhone and many copies.