Some of the networks are still to announce their iPhone 4 tariffs but let’s   look at the  that are being talked about.

If you want a free Orange iPhone 4 16GB on a 24 month contract then you will have to fork out £75 a month. Ouch! The cheapest alternative if you want a contract iPhone 4 on Orange is to pay £169 for the iPhone 4 on a £30 a month deal, which will give you 150 minutes, 250 texts and unlimited data. You can also add tethering from £5 a month

Vodafone have not yet officially released their iPhone 4 tariffs but the rumours are that an iPhone 4 on Vodafone will cost from £35 a month with the 16GB handset costing £89. It looks like the Vodafone iPhone 4 deals will be cheaper generally, which is good news all round.

By contrast, the obvious limitation of getting an iPhone on O2 is that they are not currently offering unlimited data. O2 iPhone 4 data packages start at 500MB and go up to 1GB, which should be more than enough for most people. Taking a 24 month iPhone 4 deal for comparison, £25 month will get you 100 minutes at the 500MB level, increasing to £60 if you feel you need 1GB.

Don’t discount the iPhone 4 on O2 though, you might also want to look at their Simplicity range; top up £10-14 per month and grab 300 texts with the 500MB data deal for example. That is the best starting point and it is easy enough to change tariff once each month.

As the number of iPhone 4 deals on the market increases, the number of iPhone apps increases and the number of iPhones out there increases, the Apple iPhone success story just goes from strength to strength.

Apple plans to release a new version of its current iPhone this summer, continuing its practice of annual upgrades at about the same time of year.

For  the American telephony firm AT&T, the Apple relationship has been crucial, helping to make the carrier the U.S. leader of the smart-phone market share.  Recent research has indicated that AT&T has over 43% of all U.S. smart-phone customers, compared with 23% for Verizon. These customers are especially attractive because they generally pay higher monthly rates for data plans.

For a while quarters, AT&T’s growth has come almost single-handedly from the iPhone. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the carrier said it activated 3.1 million new iPhones. In comparison, it counted only a net total of 2.7 million new subscribers as some customers moved from other phones to iPhones.

Making the iPhone available through Verizon, which has over 91 million customers,  could open up a significant new market.  In 2009, iPhone sales globally rose 83% to 25.1 million.  Since Apple already dominates smart-phone sales through existing partners, “sooner rather than later, Apple is going to have to look to find incremental distribution,” said Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi. He estimates Verizon could help Apple nearly double the number of iPhone users in the U.S.

Analysts estimate AT&T pays Apple more than $600 per phone, but sells most of them for $199 or less. Heavy iPhone users have also put an enormous load on AT&T’s wireless network, pushing the carrier to a breaking point in some markets such as New York and San Francisco

The University of Salford polled over 2,000 respondents, where the Apple iPhone grabbed 13.5% of the vote to come top of our favourite mobile devices.  The University found that the iPhone was regarded as a design classic, which has transformed the design of mobile phones. 

The University believes that in three years time the majority of mobile devices will have touchscreens like the iPhone.  The iPhone was launched in 2007 – with its large capacitive display – sparked a touchscreen arms race in high-end mobile devices. While touchscreen technology on mobiles predate the iPhone, Apple reinvigorated the concept by incorporating multitouch features into the iPhone.

Touchscreen devices will represent almost a third (27.4 per cent) of all mobile phone sales this year – up 96.8 per cent on 2009 – and will rise to 58 per cent of worldwide mobile sales by 2013, Gartner said.

The touchscreen takeover will be even more pronounced in mature markets such as Western Europe and North America, where the analyst predicts touch-sensitive screen tech will appear on more than 80 per cent of mobile shipped devices.

Both ‘finger-friendly’ capacitive and ’stylus-style’ resistive touchscreen tech will be found on phones in the short term, according to Gartner, however capacitive screens will be the “mainstream” touchscreen tech, with resistive displays filling a lower-cost niche.

Even so, Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said touchscreen technology is pushing beyond the high end and filtering down into mid-tier devices too.

Cozza added that user interfaces are beginning to be “truly optimised for touch input”, and noted that touch UIs are being more deeply integrated into underlying mobile OS platforms – both key to unlocking the potential of touch tech.

GPS is everywhere these days, and with the Nokia 2710 due in 2010, it is likely to be standard on all but the cheapest phones by the end of 2010, although basic GPS functionality will remain pretty limited for most users.  At the high end of the market Google’s new Smartphone, the Nexus and the Motorola Milestone will really start to eat into the market for standalone devices such as TomTom with their GPS functionality.

The emphasis on cameras is shifting from still photos to video capabilities, especially as many phones can now upload video clips directly to YouTube. There are still only a surprisingly small number of handsets about that can boast an 8 megapixel camera or better and although some manufacturer is bound to breach the 12 megapixel barrier, consumers will be more interested in getting HD video from their phones instead.

When it comes to displays, the growth of the smartphone market is driving bigger and high-resolution panels in mobile devices.  Given price sensitivities in the midrange market, it is unlikely that we will see anything greater than QVGA resolution screens for the time being, but expect QVGA displays to be the standard in all but the very cheapest phones.

Almost all 3G phones now support HSDPA high-speeddownloads and a lot support HSUPA uploads as well, this growth will continue. Most people can forget about 4G technologies at the moment, but expect a few small-scale launches of LTE networks in a few areas, leading up to a push for 4G in 2012 and beyond. WiFi hasn’t featured in as many phones as we expected this year, and this seems to be a deliberate attempt to steer users who want it to higher margin (i.e more profitable) handsets.

It is rumoured that 2010 will not be the year of mobile TV, despite Nokia and others producing DVB-H devices like the Nokia 5330 Mobile TV Edition, but it might not take off mostly down to a combination of consumer indifference. 

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Nokia is currently the most popular handset manufacturer among university students in the UK according in a recent survey. The survey shows that 30% of students had a Nokia phone which means that this brand is covering nearly a third of this portion of the market. Sony Ericsson wasn’t too far behind. The survey found that another 27% of the students had a handset that was made by this manufacturer.

Although these two handset makers seem to corner the market together it is BlackBerry that is really capturing attention right now. Only about 2% of UK university students are using BlackBerry devices but this is the handset maker that is gaining the most new followers quickly. It is predicted that BlackBerry growth among this group will grow considerably in the year to come.

Nokia is trying to hang on to its share of the market by producing handsets that are designed to compete with the BlackBerry phones. They recommend using the Nokia E72 if you like the feel and function of a BlackBerry device.   The Nokia E72 is the latest of their Qwerty handsets, beefing up the popularE71 with a slightly sleeker look, improved software and some interface tweaks. It’s very slim though arguably on a unit this size, a higher resolution wouldn’t make much difference.

This far Sony Ericsson hasn’t put out anything that they say really competes with BlackBerry which means that it could be their portion of the market that BlackBerry starts taking over in the year to come.

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The iPhone was first introduced in January 2007 at the Macworld conferance by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. 

The first advert for the iPhone, titled “Hello,” aired during the Oscars on February 25, 2007 on and featured clips from several notable films and television shows over the last seventy years, showing iconic characters answering telephones and saying “hello” or a similar greeting. The iPhone is shown at the end with the caption “Hello. Coming in June.”

The iPhone was launched in the United States on June 29, 2007 .  It is made under contract by a Taiwan-based company. The price today for an 8-gigabyte model is US$399. Later on, Apple eventually became available in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France and is now (Dec 2009) becomin available in other areas of the world.

The iPhone has gone on to be the world’s fastest-selling mobile phone, and with the App Store offering over 15,000 applications for downloading, it’s customisable too.

Multi-touch technology means the iPhone 3G is ideal for browsing the web, looking at photos and using the GPS, with the 3G internet speeds ensuring pages load just as fast as your home broadband. Available in 8GB or 16GB storage capacities, users can store thousands of photos taken on the 2.0-megapixel camera, tens of thousands of iPod music and up to 20 hours of video.

The Apple iPhone is a small and light device with multimedia capabilities and a touch screen enables the user to input information through a virtual keyboard and function buttons. It also has great features, such as a camera, a media player (much like the “iPod”), and the other usual functions that allow visual voicemail and text messaging. The Internet services that can be done through the iPhone include web browsing, e-mail and Wi-Fi connectivity.

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Below the screen are two soft keys, call and end buttons, plus four dedicated buttons. The home/menu key can’t be reassigned, but the others can, with one function for a short push, and one for a long one. By default, for example, pressing the calendar button briefly shows the calendar, while a long press creates a new entry.

Between these is the Navikey, a standard looking four-way navpad. It’s not entirely standard, as it has an optical sensor so, you can scroll through menus and lists by wiping a finger or thumb over it, which makes for much faster navigation – although some third party apps did seem to be a little confused by it at times. On the whole, it works well, and is a good improvement.

In applications like the web browser – which supports Flash, and had no problems with our various test pages – it makes navigating much simpler; a small mouse pointer appears and you can scoot round quite quickly. On the home screen, missed call, email or text notifications appear at the bottom; hover over the icon, and you see a pop-up with more information, and you can go directly to a specific SMS, for example.

The main keypad itself is quite small, but the keys are domed and feelgood. Call quality is clear, and we had no problems with signal, nor with setting up VoIP – though as with other recent Nokia phones, you need to download the SIP Settings application. Once that’s done, you can select ‘Internet call’ from an address book entry, or just dial a number and press the right soft key. It works well, and it’s good to see it integrated with contacts, though configuring SIP can be a bit tricky for novices.

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With the Blackberry Storm2 9520 the floating screen has been retained and updated, and Blackberry’s maker’s RIM would have us believe that it’s better than before. To push interest beyond the  the new Storm has also got Wi-Fi and more Flash memory, plus a little bit of social network integration.

Unusually for a next-generation phone, the Storm2 is actually slightly bigger than its predecessor, though there’s not much in it. At 112.5 x 62.2 x 13.95mm it’s gained .5mm in length and thickness and at 160g it’s 5g heavier. The new screen looks much the same at first glance, but sits closer to the edge of the casing, so there’s less room for it to collect dust and grime in the corners, as the original Storm was prone to.

The handset is a little less blocky in appearance, the original’s strident chrome striping having been toned down a bit, and the buttons on the sides (volume rocker, camera shutter, programmable voice notes button) now all sport Blackberry’s generic black rubberised plastic coating.

Otherwise, it looks pretty much identical to its ancestor, with micro USB and 3.5mm headphone slots, touch sensitive power/lock and mute buttons on top and the customary row of buttons along the bottom (call start and stop, back and menu). Rather than sitting below as hard buttons, these functions are incorporated into the screen.

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The Googlephone promises to be one of the most advanced smartphones, with a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one  iPhone. It will probably be the first phone to run a new version of Google’s Android software, offering high-speed 3-D gaming.

Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging.

One of Google’s challenges will be to link the phone to mobile networks so that the company’s services can be offered not just over wi-fi-connected broadband, but also over a 3G link to the internet, resulting in a real call-from-anywhere device.

Can Google have its cake and eat it? We may not have too long a wait before finding out, because experts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year.

The arrival of Orange as the second network in the UK able to sell the iPhone has not dented sales of the Apple handset through its original UK partner, O2.

Orange brought O2’s two-year exclusive deal with Apple to an end recently  as it started selling the iPhone to UK customers. Vodafone has also signed a deal with the American technology giant, and will start selling the phone in the first few weeks of next year.

Orange reckons that it had sold 30,000 iPhones by 4pm on that first day, but Key said O2 had not seen a drop-off in sales on its network.

Having the iPhone to itself for so long, however, has helped O2 outperform its rivals in the UK. Its third-quarter results, released today, showed it was the only UK network to increase revenues in the three months to the end of September, up 2%. Vodafone, by contrast, saw UK revenues decline 4.8%, and T-Mobile dropped 14.6%.

O2 has 21 million British customers, having added 292,061 in the most recent quarter. In the same period, Orange added 257,000 new customers, Vodafone added 147,000, with T-Mobile adding just 20,000.

Over the last 12 months, O2 has grabbed a near 70% share of all new customers, the wider availability of the iPhone, and aggressive marketing and discounting by rivals – especially Vodafone, which is trying to ditch its image among consumers as being expensive – will dent its performance in future.

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