Apple's biggest disadvantage - its lack of experience with phones - is its strongest card. Why? Because it isn't locked into the mindset of the operators. Operators still think in terms of voice as the killer app, while Apple thinks non-voice because all of its experience is with music and other data. Operators proudly point out that 90% of their income comes from voice and texting. However, this is not success but failure: 10 years into the digital revolution and six years after they bid £22.5bn for 3G spectrum, they still can't induce customers to use these other services. Why? Because download charges are exorbitant and the user experience often awful.

True, things are changing. T-Mobile offers "all you can eat" tariffs for a fixed (premium) price and last week the innovative 3 launched a fixed-price service claimed to have broadband speeds plus free internet calls. But these are exceptional and yet to be tested in practice. At a seminar last week hosted by Symbian, the world leader in smartphone operating systems, I was surprised by the number of participants agreeing that nothing will happen until "content" (music, games etc) represents substantially more than 10% of the operators' revenues.

Enter Apple, a company built around user-friendly content . It is the first big company in the west (Korea and Japan are another story) to approach phones from the point of view of users and content rather than preserving the milch cow of voice revenues. It has to because the increasing sophistication of music phones, some with a capacity for 5,000 tracks, are threatening the iPod's position as the music player of choice. The iPod is a great product and selling well, but its share of music downloads overall - as opposed to MP3 player downloads - is plummeting as the vast un-iPodded generation take to one device - the mobile phone - for their music.

This is not a question of taste, but of arithmetic. There are more than 2bn mobile phones in the world - and still counting (at 1,000 per minute) - but fewer than 50m iPods.

The mobile phone will become the dominant player of music. The only question is whether the phone will swallow the iPod or vice versa. Om Malik, the US blogger, points out that if the iPhone is sold "unlocked" (ie, you can put any SIM card into it and not be tied to an operator) then it could trigger a shift in power from operators to manufacturers and could lead to phones being sold for the full price and not subsidised by operators. As to which operating system it will use, the most likely is its own as Apple likes to control all aspects of its devices, but when one asks Symbian executives if it will be Symbian they come up with a standard: "We talk to all phone manufacturers," rather than an outright denial.

Apple isn't guaranteed success. Some of its products have bombed in the past, though usually (as with the Newton personal organiser and the Apple digital camera) because they were not good enough and launched too far ahead of their time. Whatever happens, it will only be a small ripple in a big pool when it is launched. But if Apple can repeat its startling success of recent years, it could not only produce a product that satisfies the iPodistas but lights the blue touchpaper under the operators. And that has got to be a good thing.

vic.keegan@theguardian.com

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