“Apple has soared over the past 12 months, with market share quadrupling,” IDC analyst Mark Novosel said. “We are forecasting that at current growth rates, Apple could be number one in the Australian smartphone market by the end of 2010.”

Nokia still maintains a solid lead on internet phones in Australia with a 35 per cent market share, however, the iPhone has made significant gains in the past year, more than doubling from just 13 per cent to 28 per cent market share. Intention to purchase an iPhone also remains high, with Apple set to triple its share this year.

While Nokia phones might be ‘Internet Capable’ they’re certainly not in the same class as real smartphones like Android and iPhones.

And sadly, no mention at all about Windows Mobile or Palm.

There are a number of factors, but I think the main one is software…Developers are following the sales figures because the better selling platforms offer a wider audience interested in the apps being developed and sold.

He uses the latest Gartner market share data to illustrate that there are only three fast growing mobile platforms; BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.

Symbian’s move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet.

Also, if you’re still interested in Nexus One, Ars have finally finished their hands on and conclude with this:

The Nexus One is the best smartphone on the market at this point for general use.

In the UK – the most sophisticated and saturated mobile market in Europe – marketers spent almost £29 million on mobile advertising in 2008, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Mobile Marketing Association now expects total spend to reach £1 billion by the end of 2009.

In the US, ad spend on mobile is expected to reach $US6.5 billion by 2012. And although in Australia the medium remains in its infancy, growth is poised to almost treble with communications specialist Telsyte forecasting that spend will grow to $20 million by the end of 2009 from just $7 million in 2008.

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn’t like?

His observations about the industry are also good:

The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers have iPhones. They may know, because they read it in an article, that Blackberry has such and such market share. But in practice it’s as if RIM didn’t exist.

Can anything break this cycle? No device I’ve seen so far could. Palm and RIM haven’t a hope. The only credible contender is Android. But Android is an orphan; Google doesn’t really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search.