In a small form factor, mass marketed mobile communications device, to be exact.
Do you think that they will now sell more phones than Nokia? Apple has one phone in their lineup, Nokia has quite many.
Again, nokia is undoubtedly the leader in TRADITIONAL mobile phone sales, and because they were unchecked, they could get away with selling the tasteless junk that they do more often than not (I'll refer you to the "interesting" pictures of nokia's "design" accomplishments earlier in this thread).
Apple's been in the phone game for 2 months and 1 week and will have sold 1 million of it's only phone product in less than 3 months with that product currently only being available in the U.S.
I ask you again, has ANY mobile phone manufacturer sold 1 million phones of 1 model in a 3 month period? Even if it's the market leader WITH international distribution? I'm waiting... (I'm actually interested in this as I do not know the answer).
Apple's innovations and IMO superior design style will only make things better for everyone, including themselves, competitors, and customers.
Look at the success of the LG Chocolate and it's "cool design". The success of that phone is in LARGE part because they incorporated the familiar Apple iPod click-wheel design.
Also, the iPhone is now marketed pricewise towards the mid-market mobile phone consumer at $399 (despite it's initial premium pricing).
I'd say that there is plenty of room for Apple to introduce something like an "iPhone Pro" at the old iPhone price point with lots of the features that people were initially complaining that the iPhone lacked.
How about an "iPhone mini" to take on the lower end consumer market.
Pay close attention to how Apple's iPod line has evolved over the past 6 years, because the iPhone line will do the same thing in less than half that time.
Bet on it.
Thats why they can experiment and produce some strange retro style phone that only appeals to limited crowd. Apple had to make their phone clean and sterile, so that it appeals to maximum amount of buyers. Some might think that it's dull looking. It's all in the eye of the beholder and you cannot argue about the looks.
Limited crowd? LOL!
Gee... I wonder what will happen when the "iPod touch" ships worldwide this month. I wonder if Apple is going to use it to introduce multi-touch input to the rest of the world before it introduces the iPhone to the the UK, Germany and France before the holidays.
Everyone's been playing checkers, and now Apple's come into the game and changed it to chess.
You have to be able to play a thinking man's game to beat a thinking man.
And everyone knows that Apple likes to Think Different.
I see that you're a newbie here on MacRumors, so I'll give you a quick lesson about Apple's design philosophy:
"Minimalist design, superior functionality".
Learn it and understand it.
Apple has proven that it works. Just look at the hundreds of thousands of U.S. iPhone owners that it has created in only 9 weeks, as well as the tens of million Mac users and 110 million iPod users worldwide.
There's a reason that Apple and it's Johnathon Ives consistently win design awards internationally, and also why most other technology companies do one of 2 things: a) copy Apple, or b) make ugly junk.
If you read non-bias reviews of the iPhone, then you'll notice that most of them say that Apples current implementation of multi-touch is really lame. Only zooming?!? Why didn'ty they come up with anything else? Isn't Apple supposed to be innovative and creative company?
Seriously, you need some mature perspective.
That argument is like me getting mad at a company that makes the first (whatever) that gets immediately accepted by an unprecedented amount of people, is it's first (whatever) in (whatever) market, and the only (whatever) available of it's kind, but I'm not happy because (whatever) could be better even though there's nothing else like it.
The iPhone, like many of Apple's products, is REVOLUTIONARY. First and foremost though, it's EVOLUTIONARY.
Why would they need to worry about doing more right now, when ALL of the competition is still doing less?
Do you really think that they don't have other multi-touch features either already finished or in development?
If you don't, then you (just like much of the competition) just don't "get" Apple. And that's how they like it.
A key factor in battle is the element of surprise.
Multi-touch input, even in it's current encarnation which is limited to zooming, was only Apple's first revolutionary revelation. More will be revealed when the competition
tries to catch up.
Until then, Apple has NO reason to reveal anything.
Apple needed to put some new technology in mobile phone to be able to hype it so much.
Yeah. That's why Apple "put some new technology" in the iPhone... for the hype.
Apple developed and FIRST implemented new multi-touch technology into it's new device for one simple reason... it could.
No one else can say that, because no one else has.
I'd prefer Apple's useful innovative technology over nokia's useless nasty "design" (colors and form factors) to "hype" a product anyday.
Speaking of hype, could you also explain me this "full internet" argument.
Web pages look the way they should on the iPhone, which is just like how they look on people's computers:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/internet/features.html?feature=safari
Not simple, dumbed down versions of the internet like only RSS feeds, text versions, or whatever.
I can see benefits of multi-touch in big screens (like 3D modeling), but not in small, low resolution mobile phone screen that it used with one hand while other is holding the phone.
I owned a Treo650 a couple of years ago, and guess what? Whenever I had to text with it, I had to use both hands. Whenever I see people using Sidekicks or many other devices, they're all using 2 hands as well.
With my iPhone, I only use one hand to hold the phone and use my thumb on that same hand to hit the onscreen keys. I remember texting friends that had also bought iPhones the weekend of the iPhone's release.
The majority of us had mastered the iPhone's keyboard within the first 48 hours using 2 hands (one to hold it and the index finger of the other to type).
Within a couple of days of that, most of us had mastered single handed text input using our thumb.
Of course, only people that have actually bought or used an iPhone (So you obviously can't -Trinity-) can verify that this is incredibly easy, and this makes your main argument about needing 2 hands to use the iPhone fall flat on it's face.
In regards to your comment about seeing multi-touch being useful with large displays,
here.
is based on my speculation that Apple won't release an updated iPhone before then and that the other companies will release theirs. I hope that 
