“I am a cool guy,” he said, still laughing. “I am cool because I have the iPhone.”

If Gillott’s story doesn’t say enough about the success of Apple Inc.‘s first shot at the mobile phone market, the number of imitation phones hitting the shelves from competitors this fall will.

LG, Motorola and HTC, to name a few, have released or announced they will consider introducing phones with similar looks or features.

The LG Voyager features a similar touch-sensitive screen that flips open to a full keypad underneath. Michelle Gilbert, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, said while the phone has been called “the iPhone killer” by some analysts, most phone manufacturers already had similar technologies in the works.

“No phone manufacturer can duplicate a phone in two months,” Gilbert said. “Yes, there are remarkable similarities between (the Voyager and the iPhone), but I think that just goes to show where the trends are going in terms of what customers are looking for in a phone.”

Jeff Kagan, a telecommunications analyst in Atlanta, said the iPhone seems to be the next trend.

“The competing carriers have been working with makers to bring out competitive offerings,” he said.

Kagan expects touch-sensitive screens will become the norm, but that the industry is only in the beginning of an explosion of new innovations.

“Once you have the speed and the technology, all you need are the ideas,” he said. “We’re starting to see some remarkable ones.”

Apple sold a million of the all-in-one phone, iPod and wireless Internet iPhones before they launched in June. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a September news release it took almost two years to sell a million iPods after their debut.

“The iPhone is a unique occurrence because the Apple people are geeks — it’s almost like a cult,” Gillott said. “But this technology is a new standard. This is a new norm.”