Apple is upfront about its refusal to permit Flash content to play on its i family. However, there are other bigger factors behind its stance. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has called it a 'resource hog', which eats up battery life and which has security issues, which could compromise your iPhone/iPad.

And he's got a pretty good case on both counts. Even Adobe has admitted it's been slow to produce a version of Flash that runs decently on mobile devices.

Was it a sign that Adobe has got its act together that Google, which had previously backed the rival open standard for content playback, HTML 5, (along with Apple) recently decided to add support for Flash to its Chrome platform? Possibly, but it's more likely an attempt to undermine Apple, which is even more firmly in the anti-Flash camp, following its decision to ban repurposed Flash apps from running on the iPhone/iPad.

This was a bold step for Apple to take, as there are vast numbers of Flash-based apps, especially games, which will be blocked from iPhone OS 4.0 devices, when the new version of the OS ships this summer.

You've got to figure that lots of games developers, who have Flash expertise were looking forward to using Adobe's newly released Packager for iPhone, which enables them to recompile a Flash game for the iPhone with a click of a button followed by a bit of tweaking.

Already some have condemned Apple's move, which they claim makes their life harder, and which seems like a constriction of freedom – a move back towards the darker, more proprietorial days of tech.

But this is exactly the point. If developers create apps and content in Flash, they remain Flash developers above all, rather than iPhone developers. So Adobe controls the technologies which emerge in the mobile sector.

So, if Apple creates some great new features for the iPhone, which could both appeal to customers, and differentiate its products from the competition, Flash developers will not have the expertise to take advantage of them. They will wait until Adobe updates its Flash recompiler software.

'We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform,' Jobs wrote in a terse email to a Flash developer, who complained to him.

Jobs has a point, especially as Adobe has a woeful record when it comes to supporting Apple's Mac OS X.

Apple's gambit is that it is better to spurn Flash, rather than see the iPhone's reduced to one of many smartphone platforms, whose feature sets are determined by Adobe.

In the meantime, Apple may irritate some of its customers and lose some alienated developers, but with over 185,000 iPhone apps available in its App Store, and booming sales, it's a risk worth taking.

Apple launched iAd during a high profile press launch for iPhone OS 4.0 and Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, made it crystal clear that Apple is gunning for Google.

‘On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at; not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the Internet, not generalized search,’ he said.

Jobs couldn't have been clearer in spelling out what industry insiders have been saying for months. Google is terrified that the success of Apple's App Store and the use of apps, rather than a web browser on smartphones poses a fundamental threat to Google.

If more and more people use smartphone apps rather than their laptops and browsers to look for information, Google is in serious trouble. Google's business is based on one source of revenue: people using its search engine via their browsers to find stuff. Google charges companies to appear at the top of its search results. If you use a restaurant finder app on your iPhone, rather than a mobile browser, Google is cut out.

If you ever wondered why a search company like Google got into the smartphone market, this is it.

And Jobs said that because iAd ‘is in the OS itself’, it will be much easier for companies to deliver compelling adverts from within an application. He added that this would also make it possible for developers to keep their apps free of charge, because they will be able to generate advertising revenues.

‘We want to be even more interactive than the ads on the web, and we want to get some of that interactivity from video. The ads keep you in your app,’ he said.

Jobs then showed off three demo ads that Apple had produced to show off the potential of iAd.

One was a dummy Nike ad, showing basketball dunks through the decades; by shaking the iPhone you got to see a new score. Another ad mocked up for the Target retail stores used a game in which the user decorates a dorm style room with items, which can be purchased at Target.

‘The ad agencies we’ve talked to have been super excited about this. For the first time, they’re seeing how to bring their storytelling skills to digital ads. They’re really excited about hiring technical people to create these kinds of ads to combine them with their storytelling,’ said Jobs.

In a direct attack on Google’s search advertising business model, he added: ‘Why is this so different? These 185,000 [iPhone] apps don’t exist on computers. This is a new phenomenon; this is the first time this kind of thing has ever existed. We never had that on the desktop, so search was the only way to find a lot of things.

‘We do not have plans to be a worldwide ad agency. We don’t know a lot about advertising, but we’re learning. We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn’t want us to have them, so we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we’re babes in the woods,’ he added.

Jobs' self-deprecation will not leave Google and its Android partners feeling secure.

And iPhone OS 4.0 will also include, iAd, a new advertising platform designed to give Google a run for its money in the fast growing mobile advertising market.

Speaking at the launch of iPhone OS 4.0, Jobs announced that Apple was opening seven APIs to developers, which will enable them to build apps that can continue to run at the same time as the iPhone is being used for something else. The APIs are for audio streaming (which will enable music apps like Pandora to play on, while you’re doing something else), for VoIP, background location, push notifications (news alerts can pop up, for example), local notification (alerts generated by apps on your iPhone), task completion (leave an upp to upload an image and switch to something else) and fast app switching.

Also introduced was a folders feature, which enables you to store apps in folders. ‘As people are downloading more and more apps, you’re having to flick from page to page to find them. People want a better way to organize them,’ said Jobs.

iPhone OS 4.0 will also come with enhanced email: there is now a unified inbox for multiple accounts, fast inbox switching, and you can organise communications by threads. It will be possible to open attachments with a single tap from within Mail. The iPhone will also get access to the iBooks service launched for the iPad. 

Apple senior VP of iPhone Software Scott Forstall previewed six new ‘enterprise features’ as he noted that ‘over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are using the iPhone.’ The features previewed were better email encryption, mobile device management, wireless app distribution, multiple Exchange accounts, support for Exchange Server 2010 and support for SSL VPN.

In a move, which will have an enormous impact on the iPhone, iPod and iPad’s fortunes in the mobile gaming, iPhone OS 4.0 will include support for networked gaming. ‘We’ve added a social gaming network. We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you. You can see how you’re progressing in a game with achievements,’ said Jobs in a move, which will directly compete with Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PSN services.

And Jobs announced a new way for companies to create a better class of mobile ads with the iAd platform.

And Jobs made it explicitly clear that Apple will not back down in its war on Adobe Flash during a question and answer session  after iPhone OS 4.0 was shown off.

And yet the iPad's fortunes will ultimately rest on the content that is available on it.

Here the message is mixed, and the reasons are at least partly of Apple's own making.

Apple's insistence on excluding Adobe's Flash from the iPad means that a large proportion of websites are peppered with warnings that Flash-based content is not available. This hardly makes the iPad a best of breed web browsing experience, when it really needs to be to attract purchasers.

Apple has also yet to get many content providers onboard: the company has created a page listing what it calls 'iPad ready' websites, which are effectively ones which offer HTML 5 content players, rather than Flash. The list might inbclude some big names like the New York Times, CNN and Time Magazine, but it only contains 20 sites.

For ebooks the iPad already looks like a more reasonable proposition, especially you can read ebooks using Amazon's Kindle application and Border's Kobo application.

Although the iPad is intended as a great platform for watching videos and listening to music, the devices single speaker has come in for criticism in some early reviews.

Market researcher, NPD Group, recently released a report Apple iPad:Consumers' Perceptions and Attitudes, which found that amongst US consumers only 18% of all consumers surveyed expressed a real interest in owning an iPad, although 27% of 18-34 year olds and 24% of people who already own an Apple product said they were either 'extremely or very interested.'

Interestingly 18 to 34 year old demographic said they were most likely to buy an iPad to play music and surf the web, two things the device is least cut out do well, as things stand at the moment.

'The most interested potential iPad customers see it primarily as a music device, or for its internet access capabilities,' said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD. 

'Considering what people are planning to use the iPad for, it’s not hard to understand why people who have these capabilities on other devices, such as the iPod Touch or a notebook/netbook, may not want to spend $500 or more on a similar device.  This points to the need for Apple to close the content deals that focus the iPad on what is likely to be its best long-range value proposition around high quality media consumption.

'For some consumers, and even among Apple owners, the prospect of spending $500 or more for a new device that doesn’t yet have a clear advantage over their other primary devices is unappetizing,' he said.

That's the assertion of Oppenheimer analyst, Yair Reiner, citing 'industry checks'. And Reiner believes that any second thoughts by the makers of Android handsets – like HTC and Motorola –  could end up benefiting Microsoft, whose Windows Phone 7 OS looks like a plausible alternative.

In a report to clients, Reiner said that Apple has been in discussions with 'tier-1 handset makers' since January 2009 about its displeasure at what it regards as infringements of its intellectual property (IP) relating to the iPhone.

Indeed, it was back in January 2009 that Apple COO Tim Cook, in a conference call with analysts, issued a blunt warning: 'We will not stand for having our IP ripped off and we'll use whatever weapons we have at our disposal. I don't know that I can be more clear than that,' he said.

At the time Cook's warning was widely interpreted as being aimed at Palm, which had announced its own iPhone-like handset, the Pre, which sported a mult-itouch user interface.

Reiner said that through 2009 other handset vendors, including Nokia, Samsung and LG, delayed releasing multi-touch smartphones. Palm, it turned out, was too small to concern Apple.

Then towards the end of last year, HTC and Motorola with its Android-based Droid released fully featured mutli-touch handsets. It probably didn't help that in the US Motorola and Verizon launched a series of aggressive TV commercials, which attacked and mocked the iPhone.

'Top-tier handset makers continued to avoid implementing multi-touch, but Apple could safely assume that they were hanging back to gauge Apple's response to Motorola and HTC. If there wasn't one, the OEMs would likely read the silence as a green light, especially after Google also moved to enable multi-touch on its Nexus One phone,' wrote Reiner.

'It was likely in order to counter that perception that Apple began reaching out to handset OEMs in January and explaining in no uncertain terms that it was now ready to do battle–and not just on multi-touch. It was ready to press its case along a number of axes that had made the iPhone experience unique, from the interpretation of touch gestures, to object-oriented OS design, to the nuts and bolts of how hardware elements were built and configured.'

In other words, Apple's case was inevitable and designed to assert its IP rights over a range of iPhone technologies and not just multi-touch.

'Few OEMs believe that simply staying clear of multi-touch can, on its own, avert Apple's wrath. We believe a lot of software and hardware is being sent back to engineering departments for work-arounds,' Reiner asserted.

And Reiner believes that smartphone OEMs, who have already been alienated by Google's decision to release its own brand Nexus One phone, are now actively looking alternative OSes.

'Our checks indicate that Microsoft has been quick to sniff out this burgeoning opportunity and has begun to aggressively promote the strength of its own IP portfolio, as well as its willingness to join battle with customers that come under IP attack,' wrote Reiner.

But why has Apple gone after HTC, a Taiwanese handset maker, which cut its teeth doing manufacturing for other companies, before starting its own brand? HTC now sells handsets that run Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS as well as Google's Android. However, it was HTC's early adoption of Android that has raised its profile. 

However, The patents which Apple alleges are being infringed primarily relate to software. They are:
They are:
    •    Patent #5481721: Method for providing automatic and dynamic translation of object oriented programming language-based message passing into operation system message passing using proxy objects
    •    Patent #5519867: Object Oriented Multitasking System
    •    Patent #6275983: Object-Oriented Operating System
    •    Patent #5566337: Method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system
    •    Patent #5929852: Encapsulated network entity reference of a network component system
    •    Patent #5946647: System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data
    •    Patent #5969705: Message protocol for controlling a user interface from an inactive application program
    •    Patent #5915131: Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O service
    •    Patent #RE39486: Extensible, replaceable network component system

So any infringement surely must implicate Google, which wrote most of Android, which is itself a variation of Linux. 

Industry analysts have identified several reasons why Apple might have picked on HTC. Firstly, it is a relatively small company, which is less likely to put a fight against Apple. Secondly it is Taiwanese, and so Apple may believe it is more likely to prevail in a US hearing. Thirdly, Taiwanese companies have a reputation for assembling products efficiently, rather than spending R&D funds to create new technologies, so this perception may go against HTC.

Significantly, HTC issued a statement, designed to counter this perception: 'HTC believes that consumer choice is a key component to success in the smartphone industry and this is best achieved through multiple suppliers providing a variety of mobile experiences

'HTC has focused on offering its customers a uniquely-HTC experience through HTC Sense and its broad portfolio of smartphones. HTC does not believe this lawsuit poses a short-term material impact to its business nor will it affect its Q1 2010 guidance.'

Apple has also requested an injunction that would ban the importation of HTC handsets into the US, a market, which accounts for nearly half of the handset maker's business, so the company will presumably want to reach some kind of accommodation with Apple. HTC is not known to have a large number of patents, to trade off against Apple's.

Apple's gameplan is almost certainly to make handset vendors, like Motorola, who use Android, to take longer to bring new products to market;  they will have to make sure that they are not infringing on any of Apple's patents, and in some cases develop new technologies.

Meanwhile Apple will be able to further develop the iPhone and expand its technological lead in certain areas.

'Apple is sending a message to the industry here: be careful what you’re doing,' said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. 'And that’s significant, because the company has been rattling its sabre for a year-and-a-half now over iPhone-related IP infringement, and this is the first time it’s really taken an offensive position on it.'

No longer do many people define their mobile phone experience according to which network they are with. Increasingly they are all about the apps they use on their phone. And in the case of the iPhone, they download their apps directly from Apple, or if they have an Android handset, directly from Google, who will also sell you a handset directly from its website.

That's what the announcement of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) was all about - an attempt to wrest back control of the smartphone experience by the networks.

And now, a recently released survey by TNS of 27,000 phone users, in 35 markets around the world, has revealed that 13% of mobile phone users buy handsets based on what content and applications they offer. That's 13% of all mobile users, not just smartphone users. By comparison, 9% select their handset based on the brand of phone, while 12% make their decision based on which network they use.

In the UK, 51% of UK phone users said they chose their phones based on handset brand, while 24% said that it was content and applications - like Facebook and Twitter, that fundamentally their mobile experience. This was just below the 25%, whose chief loyalty is to their network.

Amongst 16 to 30-year olds TNS found that 37% of respondents considered content and applications most important, compared to just 12% who considered their network to be key.

'We are seeing profound changes in the way that people make purchase decisions and in the brands that are most meaningful to them,' observed Stephen Yap, group director at TNS Technology.

'While established handset makers are standing their ground, network operators are clearly under pressure from the rise of the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. These content providers are increasingly capturing consumers' loyalties and are leading the way in bringing users the benefits of the latest mobile technologies,' said Yap.

These are the kinds of sentiments that terrify the networks, who have traditionally kept handset makers on a tight leash, controlling what features they put into their phones, and in some cases even refusing to switch on built-in features they didn't like.

With today's smartphones, networks have two competing loyalties to deal with, and you can be sure that we haven't heard the last of the WAC, no matter how unlikely a proposition it appears.

Takling to analysts Kallasvuo said: ‘There is no doubt the center of mobile innovation has shifted from Europe to Silicon Valley.’

However, Kallasvuo said that Nokia had responded by appointing over 3,000 engineers to work in North America. ‘We are working to tap into this innovation,’ he said.

Nokia was a follower rather than a leader in many of the recent smartphone innovations. For example it was Apple, which led with multitouch and selling apps online, and BlackBerry that trailblazed push emails.

Even troubled Motorola has bettered Nokia over the last few years with a series of more exciting industrial designs with products like the Razr and the Droid.

Nokia’s Symbian OS looks old fashioned compared to Android and the iPhone, and Nokia’s recent announcement of a new Linux-based smartphone OS, MeeGo, together with Intel has left it with a confused message for Symbian. Some wags have already dubbed it 'MeToo', on the basis that’s just another Linux-based offering.

Nokia is still the world’s leading handset maker by far, and it still retains top spot even in the global smartphone market despite all the attention garnered by products like the iPhone.

According to Gartner, Nokia sold 440.9 million mobile phones during 2009, making it far and away the largest handset maker. By contrast, Apple sold 25 million iPhones.

Nonetheless all the momentum in the smartphone market is coming from North America led by Apple, RIM, and Google with the Android platform.

Even Microsoft, whose Windows Mobile OS has languished in recent years, recently signaled a bounceback, with impressive demos of its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 at the recent World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.

‘There has long been a steady stream of North American firms attacking Nokia and they are likely to encourage others, such as Amazon, to follow suit,’ said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics. ‘The intensity of competition can really only get tougher.’

And Apple's decision to move the goalposts about what it does and does not allow poses worrying implications for anyone considering developing for the iPhone.

Worse still, Apple's decision to stop iPhone users from downloading apps which range from mildly purile to pornographic has been inconsistent at best, and probably hypocritical.

One developer, John Atherton, who had his iPhone app (called Wobble - 'Add realistic 3D wobbly bits to your iPhone photos') taken down from the App Store recalled his conversation with Apple. Atherton said that Apple told him that its new policies meant that there can be:

    •    "No images of women in bikinis"
    •    "No images of men in bikinis!"
    •    "No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)"
    •    "No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious)"
    •    "No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned"
    •    "Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!)"
    •    "No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content"

And yet Apple has not banned iPhone apps produced by Playboy, Victoria's Secret and other large publications like the US Sports Illustrated, which features 'swimsuit editions.'

Apple has already made itself a laughing stock for earlier arbitrary bans of apps, and now it is getting itself even further into trouble. Since when did a company founded by a man (Steve Jobs) who openly took acid and illegally hacked AT&T phone networks have the right to determine what's appropriate for adults to watch on a device they own?

Apple doesn't have enough time or resources to keep up with app store programs as it is, let alone start applying tests for smut.

And since iPhone OS 3, it's possible to limit access to minors to apps and websites, so Apple should not be in the business of determining what apps are acceptable for the rest of us.

Worse still, for the company, because Apple has an approval process, the applications that it passes as acceptable are now Apple-approved. Therefore if something unpleasant sneaks in, Apple is culpable. At least with the Android Market, Google makes no attempt to limit apps, and therefore can't be blamed for them. Just like the PC market really.

There's a grimly surreal irony that Apple, which claims to be dedicated to the maverick outsiders, and which itself was a product of the late 60s counter-culture is now re-enacting censorship rules which could have come directly from Mary Whitehouse herself.

We laugh at the arcane law which means you cannot read certain works of the Marquis De Sade at the British Library unless you are watched over the Archbishop of Canterbury. This is even more stupid, and unsustainable. 

In the pre-iPhone days it was the networks, like O2 and Orange, who called the shots. The whole mobile phone experience was controlled by the networks, who enjoyed the direct contact with the customer, and who determined, by and large what features appeared on your mobile.

Hell, O2 even had a large dome-shaped building in south London, which no-one knew what to do with, named after itself. The idea was that as an O2 customer, rather than, say a Motorola, HTC, Nokia or Sony Ericsson customer, you would enjoy privileged access to O2 concerts, and cool clubs, as well as discounted meals.

It was rare to see TV commercials advertising the benefits of a new must have handset. Compare that to today where it's hard to avoid TV commercials for the iPhone telling us that it's the handset you use that's important rather than the network.

Actually it's not even the iPhone, which Apple is using as the prime selling point. It's all those little iPhone apps, which are the big story.

And with more than 140,000 available from Apple's App Store, and more than three billion app downloads, Apple dominates the market for smartphone apps. Accodring to Gartner the market for smartphone apps will be worth $6.2 billion this year, with downloads reaching 4.5 billion apps compared to 2.5 billion during 2009.

That's why the an unlikely combination of the mobile industry's great and good – including LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson along with 24 networks including Orange, O2 and Vodafone – announced the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It's the applications, stupid.

The WAC's aims are perfectly laudable. First its backers want to create a single online market place for mobile phone apps, regardless of which OS they are running to 'unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody.'

Ultimately, the WAC intends to create a unified standard so that developers can create apps that will run on a variety of smarphones running a variety of OSes.

And with a claimed customer base of three billion any standard that WAC's members come up with will surely be attractive to apps developers and ultimately customers.

However, it's far from clear that this network carrier-led initiative will be successful. The networks, whose relationships with each other could politely be termed fractious, have shown little sign that will be able to stick together, even against a common enemy like Apple.

Then there are the enormous technical challenges behind the WAC idea. Even Google, which offers a single platform in the form of Android, has suffered from fragmentation caused by different handset vendors customising different releases of Android. As a result developers creating Android apps are already complaining that not all Android phones will run their apps.

Imagine, then, the problems in dealing with the problem of fragmentation for different brand phones running different smartphone OSes. How will a developer know what each WAC phone's hardware specs are (eg screen resolution, trackball, processor speed, GPS etc)?

These sort of problems will almost certainly lead towards phone apps that are designed to the lowest expected common denominator, meaning that they are unlikely to particularly exciting.

In the mean time the rise of HTML 5 means that the prospects of a powerful web-based apps which feel like they've been downloaded will draw closer. In which case the WAC's job will partly be done for it.

So the launch of the Google Nexus One came and went. And in its first week on sale Google sold approximately 20,000 units of its super-hyped, iPhone Killer.

Let's put that figure into some context. The T-Mobile myTouch Android touchscreen shipped 60,000 in the same period. The Motorola DROID - another Android smartphone - sold 250,000 in its first week on sale. And the one they are all striving to dethrone - the Apple iPhone 3GS - shifted 1.6 millionunits within 7 days of its launch last June.

To be fair to Google, it hasn't spent tens of millions on advertising and marketing around the launch of the Nexus One. But then it hasn't had to - the hype machine has been churning out reams of free publicity across the online and traditional media. After all 'Google versus Apple' is the kind of ding-dong brand against brand headline that journalists and punters love.

Could it be that once you remove all the sound and fury what you're left with is a capable smartphone, made by HTC, running a promising but immature OS that sports the badge and brand of a search engine? You could even go further and compile a list of Nexus One flaws that have contributed to its underwhelming debut on the market...
10 reasons why the Nexus One 'flopped'


   1. 'Virtual' customer service
      For 10 years Google has relied on email forms to deal with enquiries from its user and customers who pay it for AdWords advertising. It probably thought the same 'email it and wait 48 hours' system would work for hardware sales as well. Unfortunately when people are paying up to $529 for a product they expect be able to pick up a phone and talk to a real person about their order. Another manure-like layer of poor service was laid by the three-way snafu where no one was sure whether Google, T-Mobile or HTC was responsible for customer enquiries.

   2. Paltry internal storage - especially for apps
      The iPhone 3GS comes with 16GB of flash internal memory - so why is Google short-changing us with a paltry 512MB on the Nexus One? Yes we know it ships with a 4GB microSD card - whoopee doo! A 16GB card only costs about £20 on Amazon and probably a fraction of that to a big company like Google. And to add insult to injury you can only allocate 190MB of space to your apps. That's just bonkers!

   3. 3G or not 3G?
      Following the launch of the Nexus One, the interweb was awash with reports of people finding that their brand new smartphone could barely keep a 3G connection and defaulting to the snail-slow EDGE. It's not just spotty 3G connections that blighted the launch honeymoon - if you spent $529 on a Nexus One and tried to use it with a carrier that wasn't T-Mobile you'd find that you couldn't get 3G at all. Something to do with the frequency bands that the Nexus One operates on apparently. Fail. As geeks are won't to say on blogs.

   4. That bloody trackball
      Ooh it lights up when you have a new email or message. Otherwise as much use as a chocolate teapot.

   5. That bloody Back button
      You spend 5 minutes crafting the perfect email, go to click Send and suddenly your thrown back to the Home screen because you've somehow managed to click the Back touch button. Time and time again. Usability testing. Ever heard of it Google peeps?

   6. The camera
      Yes we know it has 5 megapixels, which is considerably more than the 3 megapixels on the iPhone. And it has an LED flash, which the iPhone doesn't. But the Nexus One camera's overall low light performance is abysmal. And in many situations - eg where there is a sharp contrast between light and dark, or a strong background light - the Nexus One trips up while the iPhone delivers a decent, usable image. Megapixels aren't everything, it seems.

   7. No physical mute button
      It may sound petty but this is one of the things that I really missed when I swapped my iPhone for a Nexus One. In a darkened cinema and your phone starts ringing? With as iPhone you can just slip your hand into your pocket, feel for the side mute button and switch it off while the phone stays out of sight. With a Nexus One you have to pull the phone out, light the OLED like a beacon and advertise to everyone what a plonker you are while you find the onscreen mute function.

   8. The Android Market
      Google doesn't vet every application like Apple does. Developers are free to sell what they want. Theoretically that's a good thing. But still the Android Market comes off poorly when compared to the iTunes App Store. It's poorly laid out, there's ton of spam comments everywhere and we've yet to see an Android Twitter client that can compete with the likes of Tweetie or Twitterfon on the iPhone. The names say it all. The Android Market does actually seem like a noisy, cheap and chaotic street market while the App Store is like a John Lewis department store: a bit more expensive, but infinitely classier.

   9. No multi-touch
      For whatever reason, possibly because it fears a patent lawsuit from Apple, Google has chosen to disable multi-touch functionality on the Nexus One. That means no pinching to zoom in and out, or to select text for cut and paste, typing quickly on the virtual keyboard or rotating an image by moving two fingers. Clicking on a mini magnifying glass to zoom in and out seems so Noughties on a smartphone that aspires to be the state of the art.

  10. The Google and Android brands
      Whisper it softly, but Google really isn't a particularly strong brand in the consumer electronics market. It's dominance of online search is down to the fact that it produces better results than any of its rivals. If another search engine started providing better results its market share would disappear overnight. Remember Altavista anyone? And Android and Nexus One are just plain geeky. Apple on the other hand has possibly the most desirable brand in the world - and one that successfully made the transition from the computer industry to the consumer electronics and mobile phone markets. The techies might sniff, but Apple's 'cool' factor does actually make a difference to a lot of people.

So there you go. 10 reasons why the Google Nexus One launched with a whimper rather than a bang. Feel free to flame me in the comments below but remember in terms of their sales-to-sales ratio it's Google Nexus One, Apple iPhone 85...