The top smart-phones today are more than just phones. They are whatever you want them to be as long as there is an app for them that addresses what you need to get done on your smartphone. Apple has a huge head start over its competitors in this area. The company has worked so hard to create an ecosystem that allows more developers to bring their innovative apps to the market and monetize their work in the process. iPhone owners have a lot of option to choose from as well. Add to that the competition among developers to come up with higher quality apps, and you have got a killer app market.

One shouldn’t forget about the influence that the iTunes has had in Apple’s success with apps. The service has made it so easy for iPhone owners to search through apps, find out about new ones, and pick up and rate apps on the fly. Apps have become so important these days that even AT&T takes credit for having access to them in its anti-Verizon ads.

I have never been impressed with the Android market. It’s true that Google has been also working to build up the number of apps available in Android market, but the service doesn’t provide you with an experience that is anywhere near what you get with iTunes. That hasn’t kept Google to bring up its app total to 20,000 (which was announced just a few days ago).While impressive, Google has ways to go before it can call the Android platform a complete success.

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Google Android may not be beating the iPhone OS today, but it certainly has got a whole lot of momentum going for it. When Google announced a while ago that it was working on its own mobile OS, there were a lot of people who didn’t know what to think of it. Google wasn’t a smart-phone company, so it wasn’t that clear what direction Google was heading to with Android. Google’s vision is not too hard to comprehend these days. The company is forming partnerships and bringing the Android platform to many devices across multiple industries.

Netbook manufacturers have already decided to take a chance on Google Android (e.g. Acer). And now you can add e-book readers to the list of devices that will be taking advantage of this platform in the near future. B&N’s Nook may not be a phone, but the fact that it uses Android shows where the platform is heading. Google is planning world domination in a whole new way, and Android is a vehicle to achieve that goal.

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A certainly nice way to go after every little weakness that iPhone has. Unlike Microsoft, Verizon’s ad campaign actually has some sting to it. The Droid has gotten some great previews from Android fans, but the jury is still out.

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We have heard a lot about all these new phones that are expected to beat iPhone and take market-share away from it. We did even hear a couple of months ago about Blackberry selling more units that iPhone in the first quarter of 2009. What we don’t often hear in the news is Apple iPhone’s degree of dominance in the mobile browsing market. According to admob’s latest report, 65% of mobile web browsing is done with Apple iPhone.

Even in the mobile app usage, iPhone dominates the market. Perhaps what’s more impressive than iPhone’s results is Android’s progress in the smart phone market. With less than 1% of market-share, Android still manages to come second best in the mobile web browsing category (9% of the market). Android phones are on the rise, though it’s early to tell how fierce the battle between iPhone and Android will be. The above report is not that surprising as both these devices offer superior web browsing experience at this point. The other handsets will probably catch up, but iPhone has so many advantages over most smart-phones that it’s hard to see any one of them dethroning Apple iPhone.

You got that right. You can officially put Linux on the iPhone. Now I am not suggesting that the current Mac OS on iPhone is any bad, and I love my iPhone the way it is. However, it is always encouraging to see possibilities available for a device such as the iPhone.

The good folks at Gizmodo have an interesting theory about Google putting Android on iPhone, which is more than possible if you can already put Linux on the iPhone. I personally don’t consider Android a threat to the Mac Mobile OS right now, and I am sure Apple is alert about the possible future threat from Android. But what I am more interested about is to see if Apple will pull a Microsoft on us by limiting or banning Android to be put on the iPhone.

What’s your take?