Nokia is doing its best to fill the gaps itself, but with momentum still to kick in, Apple has the upper hand.
Jobs and Steve Wozniak famously created the Apple computer in Jobs' family garage, building the device by hand and financing the company through the sale of Wozniak's fancy calculator and Jobs' VW camper van.
They lived in the same house in Mountain View where their son would later hand-build the first Apple computers.
At this point, Apple has the upper hand in both the device and applications arena, but Google is not done yet, nor is it done pushing network operators into submission.
For a company that claims to have hit gaming devices in its hand, Apple was conspicuously missing from the biggest videogame event of the year, which draws in some 45, 000 people from across the industry.
Apple had a strong hand in the formation last year of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, an industry group that wants to create a blueprint for an open standard that would allow content developers to write for one format, instead of three or more as they now must do.
On the other hand, if Apple comes out with more iPhone form factors in a cheaper version to address the large emerging markets, potential volume increase could offset margin decline.
Apple, on the one hand, is anchored in the business of moving information and bits.
On the other hand, when Apple addressed the issue internally, there was a great deal of backlash in the press for management shake up.
Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair has some advice for investors in regards to Apple shares: Stop the hand-wringing and buy the stock.
By backing off key innovations it will hand the initiative back to Apple, which has had its own problems in innovating the iPhone.
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Apple alleges that Samsung infringes patents in the way the Galaxy devices operate, including the use of hand gestures and the color and shape of the devices.
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Going forward, we think that we will likely see a Baidu which, like Google and Apple, keeps lots of cash on hand to capitalize on any new opportunities in the market.
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Meanwhile, some analysts said the dismissal of the case was a major setback for Apple as it was likely to give Motorola an upper hand in negotiations.
Apple, on the other hand, has a very closed operating system, giving its developers far less leeway in exchange for what the company says is a smoother, better-developed user experience.
Apple, for instance, uses evasive language in its privacy policy to allow the company as much leeway as possible to hand user data to government agencies, argues Rainey Reitman, an activist with the EFF.
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The first shows a user's hands on a traditional hardware keyboard projected in an on-screen representation (as background, Apple mentions the ergonomic strain of looking down to check your hand placement, so perhaps that's the thinking behind this one).
On the other hand, the iPod accelerated the decline in CD sales and shifted power from record labels to Apple.
Holding it in your hand, you can tell the Samsung phone's plastic parts are a bit cheaper than Apple's luxury glass-and-metal components.
Palm, which I first covered in 1994 even before it introduced the breakthrough Palm Pilot hand-held, succeeded where established players like Apple and Tandy had failed.
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