"The much hyped iPhone is so far behind other smartphones with all-important applications, that it will never catch up." - Inspired by the slew of applications and developers Nokia, Symbian, Microsoft and Palm already have

Apple has made its platform accessible so developers can more easily create iPhone applications – the Apple store will carry more than 500 of these. A wise move on Jobs's part: his personal computers have been said to not dominate partly because developers did not write as many programs for them as for Windows machines.

"When IBM introduced the PC, it was good, but it didn't take off until people started discovering the software," says Tim Bajarin, an independent analyst at Creative Strategies. He claims the breadth of the applications "dramatically differentiates the iPhone" from competing smartphones such as the Treo and BlackBerry. "The games are what you'd find on a computer, not on a phone," he adds. "You'll end up with PC-class applications that fit in your pocket."

Although the iPhone definitely has strong backers -- Kleiner Perkind plans to invest $100 million in iPhone application companies -- it has a long way to catch up. Microsoft states it already has over 18,000 applications for its Windows Mobile operating system and Palm has 30,000 active software developers.