On my last night at SMXEast, I took four 20 somethings out to dinner, two women and two men. It was interesting in that they all seemed to be connected to local mobile across the spectrum of possibilities. One had an iPhone, one could barely use her cell phone for texting, and two would have an iPhone if they could afford a data plan.

Of the four of them, two thought Windows Mobile was an abomination (volunteered not solicited), and not one of them had heard of the impending G-phone rollout from T-Mobile. The iPhone user immediately started wondering if it would make her iPhone obsolete and whether she should get one.

Admittedly not a huge sample but interesting none the less. The iPhone has a great reputation amongst all of them, Windows Mobile sucked (from their point of view) and their was immediate interest and trust in a Google phone. 

The next day, having returned to Olean and I dined with a 50 something, female lawyer friend who owns an iPhone. She didn’t have her iPhone handy and we wanted to locate the neighborhood where one of the previous evening’s 20 year old lived. I pulled out my four year old Nokia 3620 with its early WAP browser and successfully pulled up a Google Map of the location. I handed the phone to the lawyer who immediately started poking the screen and double flicking in an effort to zoom the view. She was annoyed at the lack of response and just assumed that all phones had an interface like the iPhone. It points out the huge advantage of being first with a usable design and if that translates to significant market share how hard it would be to unlodge that early leader once the habit is ingrained..

The anecdotes demonstrate how deeply the iPhone has penetrated our culture and their ready market for a lower priced phone/plan. It doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s mobile future and it is clear that Google, while having a lot of brand equity, has not yet moved their phone onto the radar of most people.