Image via WikipediaThe iPhone is an impressive device. But….

After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company….Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.

That from the NY Times this morning in a story guessing on the specs for the upcoming iPhone 2.0: more phones per week than Apple has sold altogether…

Obviously, there are major lessons to be learned there for service providers. It’s great to be a part of the bleeding edge (AT&T seems happy with its Apple iPhone relationship, though the terms were clearly a bit risky). But early adopters are clearly NOT the mass market.

The same dynamic is playing out in the Web 2.0 sector. There is tremendous discussion about Web 2.0 services like Twitter and Friendfeed among tech early adopters. But chances are * you * don’t use either service nor do any of your friends. Such services may leap the chasm to the masses, but they might not. Dare Obasanjo, a blogger and coder working on Microsoft’s Web properties, notes THREE major Web 2.0 trends from last year — blog search, social bookmarking and RSS readers — that failed to make the big leap to the mass market.

Can telcos afford to ignore the opportunity and competitive impact of ahead-of-the-curve services like micro-blogging, high-end smartphones and lifestreaming Web aggregators?

No.

But they’ll do well to understand that a cool trend does not necessarily mean there’s a business to be had, nor does a neat feature mean there’s a money-making service ready to be launched.

Ignore early adopters at your own peril; but miss — or mis-time — the leap to the mass market and you are likely in even more trouble.