Apple iPhone Out of Touch? Not Exactly

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, yet that's exactly what BlackBerry (BBRY) CEO Thorsten Heins is doing.

In an interview with Australian Financial Review, Heins said that Apple's (AAPL) iPhone isn't the top of the line phone anymore, and that competitors such as BlackBerry are passing it by.

"History repeats itself again I guess ... the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don't innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly," Heins said during the interview. "The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old."

If the user interface is old, then why have Apple's competitors, including Samsung, worked so hard to make their user interface look a lot like iOS? That patent lawsuit over the summer between Apple and Samsung (which Apple won by the way), was in part about user interface. Innovation is not about stealing competitors' ideas; it's about making your own product, and letting the customer decide who wins.

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Heins also cited the fact that the iPhone doesn't allow you to run multiple apps at once, which the BlackBerry 10 does, as well as other smartphones running Google's (GOOG) Android. The theory that the iPhone doesn't allow you to run multiple apps at the same time isn't exactly true. Users can listen to Pandora (P) while reading Twitter, Facebook, or any number of apps. The ability to run multiple apps at the same time is limited, but it's not entirely 100% accurate.

Apple reinvented the smartphone industry in 2007 by launching the iPhone, destroying BlackBerry's (then Research In Motion) market share, and forcing all of its competitors to play catch up. Apple is still the measuring stick, no matter what. Every article, every survey, every analyst note about a major company includes how that particular company is doing against Apple.

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A recent IDC survey shows that Apple owned 21% of the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2012. While Android owns 70.1%, that's due to the fact Android is available on hundreds of devices, and iOS, is only available on one. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want that, look at BlackBerry's market share. It fell to 3.2% in the fourth quarter, shipping 7.4 million units.

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