Everyone Wants to Be iPhone

…and who can blame them? How did I live before I had this thing? Why wouldn’t LG, Blackberry and the other industry leaders want to emulate the iPhone?

Here’s a copycat report, courtesy of Reuters, from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. (Did I mention I’m still in NJ and very much NOT in Barcelona?)

From the article:

The handset business will produce more than a billion phones this year, but is suffering a crisis of confidence brought on by sharply changing business models that has only been exaggerated by the global economic slump.

 “Imagination is expensive in a year such as this,” said Richard Windsor, a technology analyst at the conference who is with Nomura Securities in London. 

The giants of the phone industry — Nokia, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, LG Electronics Inc, Sony Ericsson and HTC Corp — are humbling themselves to copy a company whose phones account for only 1 percent of handsets.

Did you catch that? All this madness over a phone that accounts for 1% of handsets. Now that’s what I call a Purple Cow.

Full article on the Reuters site is here.