The Apple iPhone has for several years been the smartphone to own, a status symbol of the iOS faithful that says you are cool to own such a device, but it appears that owning an iPhone may not be as cool as it once was if you go by what the acting president of HTC America has to say.

According to the guys over at Geek Wire, HTC America acting president Martin Fichter during the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle chatted about such things as the patent fights, Windows Phone 7 and apparently a survey that shows the iPhone is no longer a cool smartphone.

On the patent fighting in the mobile space, Fichter says that they are “disrupting,” as a lot of time, money and energy goes into fighting the patent wars rather than using said energy to deliver new tech and new user experiences.

On Windows Phone 7, Fichter says that the operating system has its “shortcomings” in some areas but he’s happy that Mango has improved on that, and that he is happy with the HTC Titan due to the Windows integration being beautiful.

However, when it comes to the iPhone, here’s what Fichter had to say… “Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college – she’s down in Portland at Reed – and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”

Now of course chatting to a “few kids” does not make a real survey so saying the iPhone isn’t cool anymore is a bit of an overstretch; however, in this world it is often the case that what is seen as cool by parents isn’t often seen as the same by the younger generation and this usually goes with all things, but I think that just because a dad or mother uses an iPhone doesn’t mean a son or daughter wouldn’t also use the iPhone.

So what o our readers think about this, do you feel that owning an iPhone is now un-cool or do you think basically the claim that the iOS smartphone in no longer a cool handset is all bunkum?