Cheap smartphones could change the way carriers price contracts here in the U.S.

Whatever the case, if you thought Android going from 30,000 activations a day to 300,000 activations/day was impressive, 2011 might be an even bigger growth year for Android.

Growth targets are just starting to trickle out, but HTC, who make high end Android devices and a few Windows Phone 7 devices expect to triple their 2010 output in 2011. Yet if things play out the way Rubin, Google, Broadcom and HTC hope, even that may wind up being a conservative estimate for Android growth. What's most interesting is that unless Apple (AAPL) has a plan to keep up, their iPhone, once one of the only usable smartphone games in town, may wind up back where most Apple products are slotted-- at the top of the market, affordable only to those willing and able to pay a premium for Steve Jobs' aesthetic sensibilities.

I expect better from Weintraub. He says the iPhone "may wind up" relegated to the top of the market. But isn't that exactly where the iPhone started, and has remained, from 2007 through today? The key is how much of the "top". There's a big difference between, say, dominating the top 5 percent of a market and the top 30 percent of the same market.

In July 2007, by some measure of the word "usable", Apple had 100 percent of the market for, to use Weintraub's term, "usable smartphones". Things only look disastrous for Apple if you count their ever-declining share of "usable smartphones", rather than the company's share of phones, or even just smartphones.

Android isn't like Windows. Windows was created to make massive licensing revenue for Microsoft, and to serve as a platform for additional sold-for-profit software like Office and Exchange. Google gives Android away free of charge, profiting only indirectly (but, perhaps, handsomely nonetheless) by delivering mobile ads. There's never been anything like Android before. But there's never been anything like iOS before either.