Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive. What they hide is vital.
iOS is responsible for more than the raw numbers suggest. iOS begat Android, WP7, and countless lesser imitations. Whether this was through inspiration, as I believe, or outright theft, as Apple maintains, is immaterial.
The fact is that the modern smartphone market was born with the introduction of the iPhone. All else before was prelude.
Google acquired Android before 2 years before iOS came about. I think it was more a case of "adjacent possible" developments [1] happening in parallel and learning from each other (as great artists are prone to do).
Your first link is actually debunking that. They had prototypes that looked like Blackberry devices, yes, but in the same video they show a prototype with a touchscreen-driven UI as well.
Now have a look at the touchscreen UI itself, it borrows heavily from blackberry style bottom bar. The video was uploaded on Nov 11, 2007....iPhone released in June 2007. (Let's keep aside the fact that Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board) Six months is not much of a developmental time, but not exactly less time to polish such stuff for a company the size of Google. See the progress here (May 2008): http://news.cnet.com/2300-1046_3-6240422.html
Only Touchscreen UI shown and much more polished. HTC Dream was released in Oct 2008.
Android was a substantially different system before the iPhone, very much concentrating on keyboard input as a sort of Blackberry alternative. Google saw which way to shift, though, unlike RIM.
Actually in the early days of the iPhone even Engadget didn't count it as a smartphone because it didn't run apps. Of course this changed later. What was considered a smartphone was mostly a Palm Treo, Motorola or HTC device. Some had Windows CE some had other OSes. The real addition of the iPhone was that while everyone was focused on features that they could sell to geeks and executives, Apple focused on consumer level usability. In other words, iOS did NOT beget neither Android nor WP7 but showed the industry that there are other important things that drive success.
What you see in the data is just the percentage that the red (Apple) takes.
But you fail to see that:
1) red went there from nowhere. In a totally unrelated industry from zero to hero.
2) all other colors, from that point on, started offering stuff just like what red introduced. Before the iPhone's introduction, the top 10 phones looked totally unlike it. So much unlike that people thought it would be a flop, and considered the total lack of physical keyboard "insane" (!). After that introduction, all they started look totally the same.
(Including Android, whose prototypes shown just before the iPhone announcement were crappy, 2006 like regular phones, with physical keyboards and a small screen -- and whose firsr version, introduced a whole year after the iPhone was just like it).
Android's appearance coincides with iPhones ability to securely interoperate with Exchange. Executives started demanding active sync access for those iPhones they were playing with at home.
Android didn't have an ability to do that for awhile unless you used apps like Touchdown. IMO, android started hyper growth in 2010-2011.
I ran a 100,000 seat exchange environment from 2008-2012. We had 50 active sync devices in 2008. 3,000 in late '08, 8k in 2010 and around 10-11k today. During that same period, BlackBerry went from 5,000 to less than 500.
It takes that long (and more) for a platform entrenched with enterprise users to lose its dominance. Those are slower to adapt than the end user market (consider enterprises still using IE6).
Plus, the original iPhone didn't have Exchange support and some other stuff RIM users would want to ditch RIM, it got that later.
I'm sure we can include Android in the GP's assessment. It's all part of the same movement of computer-grade devices replacing phones; and the chart makes it overwhelmingly clear the pair were a lethal combination.
Apple's "Godphone" keynote was a rude awakening for an industry who had dragged their heels for years, providing a rubbish experience for users and locking all but the largest developers from any access to their devices.
"The rumors swirling around RIM and LG are centered around exits and some suggest Nokia will follow. [...] Earlier last decade the exits were prompted by loss of brand value and subsequent loss of distribution. This decade disruption brought upon by mobile computing brings with it new business models centered on ecosystems and value captured through software and services."
That data is aggregated. You have everyone from a CEO to a college student with no financial support from her parents on there. It doesn't show who's buying which phone, nor does it show the shift from "feature phones" to smartphones. The trendsetters were (are?) buying iPhones, which has always been a premium device which Apple wants to make substantial profits on. Samsung competes on price,
