Talking about android phones..
I happen to have been able to play with an iphone 3GS and an HTC Desire (dunno if it's available there in your countries, and/or with other names). In my opinion iphone still has a better and slicker interface. Buttons, although not-text-tagged, behave just as I expect them to - for android phones, this would not always be the case.
Also, per my own experience, developing new applications on iphones "feels" better - the development tools are more-or-less more complete. Eclipse? Just not as good. (This is even though I have prior programming experience in Java but not in Object C/Three-20
) Yeah I admit you need OSX to develop iphone applications... but I have a Mac, so it doesn't matter
Oh to answer the question: Yes. But not too soon
(my current mobile is just a SE Z750i
)