Competition trying to take a bite out of the big Apple®

By Nick Arnold

In a busy 3-week period for Apple^® they not only announced that sales of their latest device, the iPhone™ 3G S, had reached over 1 million within three days of the launch, but also that downloads of the latest iPhone™ 3.0 software had topped 6 million in the first five days since its release.

Add to this the announcement that customers have downloaded over 1.5 billion applications from the iPhone™ App Store and you could be forgiven for thinking that Apple^® is set to dominate the smartphone market for the foreseeable future.

Others may disagree. The summer of 2009 has seen Nokia launch its flagship N97 smartphone device, while RIM^® has released BES 5.0 and Palm^® has announced the Palm^® Pre™ will be available in time for Christmas in the UK.

The last of these is viewed in some quarters as the biggest threat to the iPhone™, with a number of former Apple^® engineers helping to create it.  Both reviews and sales have been positive since its release in America, a trend predicted to continue once available on this side of the Atlantic.

With its sleek webOS™ operating system, and all the features common in the modern day handset (GPS, Wi-Fi, Camera), Palm^® are looking to replicate the success of the big Apple^®, in more ways than one. The Pre™ had the ability to ‘trick’ iTunes into thinking it was an iPod™ device thus allowing synchronisation; something Apple^® have now blocked with the release of iTunes™ 8.2.1 software level.

According to Apple^® “iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.”

It remains to be seen whether the battle for the smartphone market will rollover into a legal war.