"More competition = more innovation"
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
Well, let me take you back to 2006. HTC- and others- were churning out touchscreen WinMo smartphones at a rate of knots.
They features ARM processors (including hardware graphics acceleration), Assisted GPS, touchscreens (albeit single touch- and with a GUI to match those limitations), 3G/HSDPA, Quad-band GSM, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi (802.11G), cameras, Google Maps, the ability to browse the 'proper' internet (not sure about Flash, I think it was available but old), they played movies, they played music, they could even stream TV channels from a good few providers (actually, I think one or two actually had DVB decoders in them...). Every new generation of phones was bringing new features as more stuff was miniaturised to the point where it'd fit
Then Apple came up with the iPhone. A massive marketing effort, creating massive competition. This should have created phones with a featureset that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But so far, all that's changed is the addition of faster processors (which would have happened anyway), MultiTouch (fair dos on that one- I imagine it'd have taken a few years to get onto mobiles without them) and accelerometers (used for... err... figuring out which way up your phone is. And maybe playing games). If I've missed anything, feel free to tell me.
And EVERY other smartphone's done the same thing. They're all nigh-on identical. It looks like everyone fired their R&D departments to make room for more marketing types. The upcoming generation of phones is faster and chromier. And that's it from what I can see. So the extra competition has produced feature-stagnation; the companies have refocussed on selling their phone to people who don't care what's in their phone so long as it's newer and shinier than the next guys because that's where the mass market money is.