The iPhone is (still) saving the mobile industry

The iPhone has been, by many measures, one of the most successful products in business history. Nearly 200 million iPhones have been sold in four and a half years, 37 million of them in the last three months of 2011. Apple's market cap has soared from $104 billion in June 2007, when the first iPhone was sold, to $480 billion today. Less visible in such soaring statistics, is the impact on the mobile carriers.

Even with the heavy subsidies phone companies must pay to Apple and some five years after its introduction, the iPhone may well be the best thing going for the mobile industry. According to Hudson Square Research, iPhone users have a net present value -- a measure of cash flows over a product's lifetime -- that is twice as high as subscribers using the old, clamshell feature phones. The smartphone, as conceived by Apple, seems designed to generate carrier fees. Unlike the standard feature phones, which are primarily used for phone calls and text messages, iPhone users also pay for wireless data connections. That's all true for other smartphones too, of course. But more than any other device, the iPhone is responsible for inspiring all those categories of fees -- voice, texting, data -- as well as the class system of data usage. By influencing the look and operability of other Google Android and other smartphones, the iPhone had a broader impact on the wireless industry as a whole.