When the iPhone was launched there was really two competitors in the Smartphone market: Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Blackberry was aimed very much at email and the corporate market, whilst Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was for the techno savvy. Along came Apple with the iPhone and the App Store and iTunes and voila we have a mass market consumer product.

Apple decided to control the system as much as possible with single carrier agreements, a very closed development environment, allowing you only to load apps and music via the App Store and iTunes.

The ‘New Kid on the block’ is Android which is exactly the opposite. This has been adopted by T-Mobile, Sprint, and in a few days time Verizon Droid. The “I Don’t” advert for Droid highlights the restrictive features of the iPhone Platform.

With the big carriers having the ability to roll out SmartPhones with less restrictive controls one has to wonder if Apple has missed the mark with the strict controls and in particular the single carrier sales strategy. The Android platform has the potential to blow the iPhone out of the water, but is it really what consumers want? One of the big benefits of the Apple architecture is that it just works and you don’t need a masters degree in computing to use it.

Time will tell, but the Android SmartPhones are starting to become much more prevalent in the Marketplace and Apple needs to keep an eye out to stay ahead of the game…