Are there too many smartphones on the market?

That and other provocative questions were posed during a CES panel discussion between journalists for The Verge and managers for Windows Phone at Microsoft and smartphone makers HTC and Samsung. The question of whether there are too many smartphone variations on the market was partly incited by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha's comment at CES that the company plans to make fewer phones in 2012. The HTC and Samsung officials agreed there is a profundity of smartphone choices with little to distinguish some of them, but they also argued that competition and demands from users have led to the proliferation of devices. Add in frequent OS changes and the need to have devices at different prices, and the result is a surfeit of phones on the market, they said. But Josh Topolsky, editor-in-chief of The Verge, would have none of it, asking: "Is this the kind of [b.s.] we need, with all these products in the market? Are we trying to create demand where there isn't any?"