It seems like they are relying on their little keyboard and the fact that they have many many hardware models, all with terrible software.

The iPhone is just a frame, and the hardware inside is not very exotic. It’s not until you get above the hardware that it starts to get interesting, with a complete OS X in there. Any feature that Apple or a 3rd party developer wants to add is already 99% built on iPhone compared to Blackberry. The developer doesn’t have to teach the iPhone typography or 3D graphics or animation or networking or security or all of these other things we take for granted on a modern Unix operating system. That is why they’re making iPhone apps at such a rapid pace. Who is competing? Nobody.

Another phone with a chiclet keyboard and no Web just doesn’t seem like it will do anything for RIM. Like so many other phones, their software is only a millimeter deep. Trying to make up for that with many models makes no sense.