I'm not sure why anyone bothers to read let alone make these predictions. Last week's was how WP7 would overtake iOS phones within a few years, the basis of whi

I'm not sure why anyone bothers to read let alone make these predictions. Last week's was how WP7 would overtake iOS phones within a few years, the basis of which seemed to be to replace Nokia's Symbian numbers with WP7 units. Yeah, in-depth research there. Frankly I'm more willing to bet money on Nokia fading into irrelevance. Message to Elop: if someone needs to pay you billions of dollars to do something, it's probably not a good idea, especially when that other party will be getting most if not all of that money back in licenses anyway. Another fallacy with such "analyses" is that they assume static goalposts. To me--and I suspect to Apple--smartphones are no longer what matters. In this sense they're much like the MP3 market. Sure, Apple dominates that market but it's just not of primary importance anymore. The real prize isn't smartphones (IMHO), it's tablets. A tablet is much more of a general purpose device than a phone. I use my phone for calls, messages, checking my email and the maps/directions. I use my iPad for Web browsing, reading, research, watching movies, playing games and, well, basically everything else. I think Android got a real leg up in the phone market because if you give someone a phone that makes and receives phone calls and SMSs then you've given most people what they need most of the time. Not everyone (with a smartphone) is into buying apps, music and other digital content on or for their phones. Tablets strike me as different because that ecosystem is far more important. The availability of digital content, the suitability (eg hardware consistency) as a game platform, etc all advantages that are going to be extremely difficult to match anytime soon (IMHO). Apple sold 15M iPads in 9 months last year. This year predictions are running at 40-50M (if not more). We'll start to get a better idea of this when Apple releases their earnings report in late April (and a much better picture in July). I would put the competition for the iPad at at least 1-2 years behind the iPad and I'm not sure what'll happen first: 100M iPads (likely by the end of 2012 easily) will have been sold or 10M of everything else. Back to the phone market: I think this is actually a reasonably conservative estimate in that I believe in 5 years it quite likely there'll only be two games in town (meaning with >10% market share), being iOS and Android, so I fully expect Android to have 45% of that.