Thanks to this week's Carnival for pointing me towards one of the best articles on smartphone convergence I've read for ages, posted by Tomi in "The year the i-Pod died". Highly recommended reading.

Excerpt: "So it is not a question of is the i-Pod better technically. Of course it is. If you want to buy a really good music player, you will start by considering the models by i-Pod and maybe some of its close rivals. You don't even start off by considering the mobile phone as a music player. But portable music players do not sell 750 million units every year. Mobile phones do. Portable music players are not replaced every two years on average. Mobile phones are. That means that whatever is the standard features of a mobile phone will be sold to us whether we really prefer that device or not. Because of the overall size of the market for mobile phones, and the speed by which they are replaced, this means that the music player will become a common feature next year. People will acquire MP3 player ability almost by accident, simply as they replace their phones."