As Apple’s iPhone celebrates its sixth birthday, the pioneering smartphone has carved out a solid market position, and a demographically distinctive user base, within the ever-expanding world of smartphones (which, according to the Pew Research Center ’s Internet & American Life Project, more than half of Americans now own).
The iPhone is, along with Google’s Android, one of the two dominant smartphone platforms in the United States . As of May 2013, according to a recent Pew Research Center report on smartphone ownership, 25% of all U.S. cellphone owners– and 43% of smartphone owners — own an iPhone, a few percentage points behind Android. Other smartphone platforms — Microsoft’s Windows Phone, the fading BlackBerry, the handful of Palms still in use — are far behind.
There had been smartphones before Apple launched its first-generation iPhone on June 29, 2007 (the Simon Personal Communicator from IBM had a brief, unsuccessful life in the mid-1990s), but the iPhone’s big touchscreen, ability to add apps and overall usability are widely credited with making smartphones mass consumer items.