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I think everyone is missing my point. These are first and foremost mobile telephones. Not PDAs. Not "smartphones". The vast majority of those 250 million "smartphones" will not be used as such, because they are not designed to be...no SIPs, numeric keyboard only etc etc etc please read my prior posts.
And free-with-contract devices are not, what I as a "power user" am remotely interested in, nor would I wager, are the vast majority of this site's readers and the million Treo users, or the XDA/Jam/hw6xxx users.
I bought an XDA. I bought a P900. I bought a Treo. My colleagues use Nokia 9500/9700s, or the Jam. These are all smartphones in my book. My mate's little Nokia, while a nice phone is not a smartphone.
I would say that there is a significant and growing number of business and power users who want more than what Nokia's slightly kinky design department churns out in the millions. Their corporate survival is based on selling as many phones to service providers as possible, in bulk. They have little to no interest in providing a device to end-users. This is where we as customers will suffer, because the service providers as we have already seen will insist that the phones are locked, bound and otherwise restricted to their networks and related services - that means restricted multimedia, limited third party software and who knows? These things are all revenue streams for the providers. It's good business.
And going back to POS, this is why I was originally saying that the move to a Linux kernel is good news...as long as they bring their third-party app developers along with them and stay PDA-centric. Because if they try and produce plain-jane phones the market, and the likes of Nokia for the very reasons that you have given, will murder them.
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