Apple debuted it’s iPhone a couple of weeks ago and the initial thought of many analysts was that it would change the face the smartphone industry the day it ships. Stocks of RIM and Palm dropped significantly shortly after Steve Jobs keynote at Mac World and the iPhone, although won’t be released until June, is extravagantly expensive, and is a first stab at a completely new type of mobile device, is tops on the new toy lists of many a gadget junky.

Now that much of the hoopla and fanfare after the announcement of the iPhone has passed, analysts have had a chance to really think about what the iPhone is. Some are claiming that the iPhone isn’t really even a smartphone because it won’t support third party applications.

We must conclude at this point that, based on our current definition (of smartphone), the iPhone is not a smartphone; it’s a very high-end feature phone. Feature phones have third-party applications too, but these are relatively weak and limited to applications that work with the middleware such as Java and Brew.

Some analyst believe that the “lack of customization and application availability” might even hamper sales of the iPhone. I am not so sure, however. Although the iPhone may not meet the definition of what a smartphone is, I don’t believe these analysts are thinking about the folks that will go out buy the iPhone the day it hits the shelves…

Consumers with disposable income that want to have the latest greatest iPod as soon as they can get one.

The fact that the iPhone won’t be able to run all the apps that traditional smartphones can won’t matter much because the folks buying them won’t be thinking about that. So long as the touch screen works, it plays music as well as an iPod, and isn’t as fragile as it looks, Apple and the iPhone is golden on the first version.

[Via TechWhack]