I'd recommend that folks read what the writer said, not what others imply he said. In the first place, as another posted mildly noted, the analyst did not imply the Droid was not a "high end" phone. What he said was that the future of the Android o/s was mainly in mid-tier and lower phones. That may or may not be true, but it's not necessarily a bad guess, especially if one assumes that "mid" and "low" tier phones (defined by price) will be getting "smarter."
And he may well be right that the iPhone and phones built on the Maemo platform will dominate the "high end" of smartphones. The dirty little secret of Android's "open source" approach is that the o/s platform, itself, may become so fractured that applications written for one version of the Android o/s won't work on others. We already see that trend. The advantage Apple and Maemo-based phone manufacturers enjoy is that they can control the proliferation of applications and assure compatibility among applications.
Bottom line is that "tiers" of phones are defined by price not by potential functionality. And a couple of years from now I suspect that the android o/s will dominate the range of phones in the "mid" and "low" end price points. Whether manufacturers will choose to use it in their "high" end phones depends on whether it continues to be a playground for geeks or evolves into a more tightly integrated and uniform base for software.
And he may well be right that the iPhone and phones built on the Maemo platform will dominate the "high end" of smartphones. The dirty little secret of Android's "open source" approach is that the o/s platform, itself, may become so fractured that applications written for one version of the Android o/s won't work on others. We already see that trend. The advantage Apple and Maemo-based phone manufacturers enjoy is that they can control the proliferation of applications and assure compatibility among applications.
Bottom line is that "tiers" of phones are defined by price not by potential functionality. And a couple of years from now I suspect that the android o/s will dominate the range of phones in the "mid" and "low" end price points. Whether manufacturers will choose to use it in their "high" end phones depends on whether it continues to be a playground for geeks or evolves into a more tightly integrated and uniform base for software.