A year ago, according to Nielsen, smartphone purchases made up 38% of all cell phone purchases in the US. Now it is 50%. This means the market is quickly approaching a saturation point. The speed of saturation should be particularly troubling for software developers.

The reality is that most people don’t spend their time looking for new software apps to install on their devices. Especially in productivity, most download a handful of apps that they use all the time and that’s it. The best time to get a customer to look at new products is when they first buy into a platform, and that is usually when they first buy a smartphone. As the rate of new adoptions drop over the next few years, I believe that app sales will drop, at least for the kinds of general purpose apps that currently saturate the app stores.

Does that mean there won’t be break out hits? Of course not. There is still plenty of room for new entrants to make sales, but I do mean for every general purpose calculator, task list, photo and weather app, US-based sales are soon going to decrease and fall off as the demand from new customers decreases. Marketing is going to matter a lot more than it has.

How do we combat this trend? Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Focus on a vertical market
• Focus in a software area where there tend to be a desire to find new things (i.e., games)
• Focus on providing additional capabilities, features and apps to your existing customers
• Focus on International markets
• Focus on unique products that weren’t possible before everyone had computers in their pockets

This isn’t dire. There is plenty of opportunity out there and lots of amazing opportunities that weren’t available before everyone carried a computer in their pockets. But if we thought the smartphone gold rush slowed a couple of years ago, well, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.

I know that my iPad will be arriving any second now but the thing that has me so excited is a piece of Apple software: iPhoto for iPad.

I updated my current iPad to iOS 5.1 and immediately went to buy iPhoto. WOW!! I can’t say enough amazing things about it.

First, I’m no Photoshop junkie. In fact, even though I have taken a lot of nature photography over the years, I really don’t know what I am doing in it. I’ve managed to learn a few tricks but not enough to consider myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination.

Once upon a time I could get a lot out of Photoshop and even thought about learning more. Now my needs are far more modest: make some colors pop, straighten a picture, deal with some red eye, etc. But I haven’t really done any of that. I import pictures into iPhoto on the desktop and maybe fix a little red eye but usually don’t bother, all to be done another day. I don’t have the time and patience to figure it all out.

After the Apple presentation announcing the new iPad and iPhoto last week, there was a lot of hyperbole about how touch was the right way to do photo editing. I was skeptical then. Not anymore.

Not only is the experience of editing photos with iPhoto on an iPad awesome but frankly the app itself is a marvel. I’m not certain I’ve ever seen such a beautifully designed piece of software before. It’s a very complex app with a lot of capabilities. I just love the way Apple presents it to me.

So I sat two nights ago editing photos, playing around with the interface, checking out how Apple brought this together and made it functional. Not only are my pictures nicer but I’m seeing tips and tricks that maybe I can apply to our own products in the future.

Oh, Apple. You do set the bar high.

The biggest surprise of the new iPad announcement was none of the specs or features, it was the name. Most predictions were iPad 3 or iPad HD. Instead, it is just iPad.

At first this caught me by surprise but then quickly realized it made sense. With one major caveat, Apple only uses brand extensions for product form factors, not for individually identified models. So we have Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. We have iMac and Mac Pro. We have Mac mini. We have iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle and iPod classic. And we have Apple TV. Each successive generation of these devices are still known as iPod touch, iMac, etc.

How do we differentiate? With iMacs and Macbooks most people refer to the screen size. I have the 13″ Macbook Pro. To differentiate even further it generally is referred to as the year purchased but that doesn’t really matter to most people and I rarely hear that mentioned except among the technorati. [2]

So iPad, going back to being named iPad, actually is following this model. It is confusing temporarily because the iPad 2 is still around, but I think this will be resolved in the fall or next spring when Apple launches a second iPad screen size. I think we will be talking about the 10″ iPad and the 7″ iPad instead. To continue talking about the iPad 3 with the 7″ screen defeats Apple’s traditional naming conventions.

I mentioned a caveat and that, of course, is the iPhone. The iPhone, though, is different because it is the one device sold extensively by a third-party: carriers. It is one thing to have an Apple-trained person needing to know which device you are carrying. Apple has control over that and can train their folks specifically. But could you imagine the confusion at an AT&T store if you walked in needing help with a non-descript iPhone? That person really needs to know which model of iPhone you are carrying.

In addition, how does one person identify their iPhone to another person? With an iPod, for instance, the form factor is unique. Same for a Macbook because of the screen size and soon the same will be true for iPad. But with an iPhone there is little to differentiate an iPhone 4 from an iPhone 4s, except the name.

For these reasons I believe Apple will continue giving names to the iPhone and it will remain a unique convention for Apple’s naming schemes.

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[1] Yes, I bought an iPad yesterday with 64GB of memory, wifi+4G, black, and a different smart cover color to differentiate from the iPad 2 we have here. If I wasn’t a developer would I have bought it? Yes. I’ve been waiting for the retina version since Apple launched the iPhone 4 almost two years ago. Given that, I wouldn’t have bought the second generation iPad 2 as the first generation was good enough for me.

[2] We don’t get this with the Mac Pro or Mac mini, though, since those don’t have screens but in both of those cases I have only ever heard them referred to by those names. Technorati may also comment on the processor speed.

Apparently I’m going to keep pounding on this point because I think it is really important.

Jim Dalrymple wrote yesterday, “The PC industry has spent an incredible amount of time and money trying to convince us that computers (netbooks or ultrabooks) are what we really want to use. The problem is, that’s not true.”

M.G. Siegler wrote on the topic, too. “The problem PC makers face (but most don’t seem to realize) is that using a computer is not a natural thing,” he wrote:

Much more natural is holding something in your hands and touching it to manipulate what’s on the screen. … The keyboard itself is unnatural. It’s something that kids have to take some time to learn because the letters are completely out of order.

Yes, keyboards are unnatural. I agree. And talking is natural. I agree with that, too. And touch! Touch is natural also.

But you know what else is natural? Using a freaking pen! Using a pen (or pencil or crayon) is actually one of the stages of childhood development, right there with touching, feeling and talking.

Can we have a freaking pen that works decent with an iPad, please???