Apple squeezed itself into third place in the list of world smartphone makers during Q4 2007, pushing ahead of Motorola and Palm and all the Windows Mobile device suppliers.

The iPhone itself may divide opinion but there's no questioning its success. According to market watcher Canalys, Apple shipped 2,320,840 iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2007, just beating Motorola, which shipped 2,301,260 smartphones during the period....

Focusing on the US market, Apple took a 28 per cent share, behind only RIM, which accounted for 41 per cent of the market.

Apple’s iPhone is “pretty useless” and sales in Germany have not dented new customer numbers for E-Plus, the German mobile unit of KPN, said Ad Scheepbouwer, chief executive of the Dutch telecoms company.

"For some users, there’s never enough memory," Greg Joswiak, Apple Vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Marketing, said in yesterday’s press release announcing memory-enhanced versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple is banking on it.

Apple learned that 1) the original iPhone price was too high and 2) most customers willing to buy a premium mobile phone also were willing to pay an extra $100 for the model with the most storage.

T-Mobile and 3 may have done it - and Orange and Vodafone may be talking about doing it—but O2 isn't planning on getting into bed with fellow operators to share network resources anytime soon.

Ben Dowd, head of business sales at O2 and recently appointed O2 UK board director, told silicon.com owning its own network is a unique selling point for the company.

Orange, the mobile telecommunications arm of France Telecom, has sold around 90,000 Apple iPhones in France as of the end of January, compared to 70,000 a month earlier, the head of Orange France, Louis-Pierre Wenes, said.

Half of the iPhone purchasers are new clients for Orange France, Wenes added.

Next Article: Applelinks Tech Web Reader - MacBook Air Edition 9

Previous Article: SuperDuper! 2.5 Advanced Disk Cloning/Recovery Utility Released

	Print this page is sponsored by www.MyMacStore.com For all your iPod, iPhone and Mac Gear