Well. Nokia makes great hardware. I love my E71 for instance, it is a great piece of hardware.

But kind of polarizing, in 5 years the hardware designs will converge and every piece of touch screen hardware will look like the black monolith from 2001, or an advanced version of the smaller monolith from a fruit company: it's a big thin square with a screen as large as that what the device.

Ok, some might have a hardware keyboard, some not.

Then differentiating with hardware becomes very very hard. The Nokia black box might have better materials and might be one millimeter thinner, but our worthy competitors can do something nearly identical. OEM manufacturers already can do hardware that is virtually identical to brand name hardware.

Clearly, differentiating with hardware is not enough. The software is the thing that counts, not the hardware. People do not buy the iPhone for its hardware (not that there is nothing wrong with it), but for the software.