I generally hate wading into these "versus" debates but oddly enough, I can't help myself in this case.

So here goes. A bit of background. I used the original iPhone for 3 months (and still own it) and I have from time to time played with the App store. I've been a primary Symbian user for many years now.

With that out of the way, here's my take.

The App store has plenty of great games and apps. I don't think it's appropriate for me (or most other people for that matter) to determine how the apps on the iPhone compare with the apps on Symbian in terms of usefulness just because, well, I haven't reviewed the tens of thousands of apps on both platforms.

However, I will say that in terms of getting *easy* access to useful apps, the iPhone, until recently, very much had Symbian beat. And I think this had to do with the perception among some that the iPhone has more useful apps than other platforms. And also, because of the relatively closed hardware platform (I know the 3GS breaks the trend), it's resulted in a console-like dev environment that's created a thriving gaming scene. This is key. (Incidentally, if you had told me three years ago that Apple would be a key player in the mobile gaming scene, I would've called you crazy. Ha!)

Now, that's not to say that there aren't a whole lot of crappy apps in the App store. In fact, one company recently got shut down because they were making superfluous apps that did like one thing (for instance, an app that pulled images off of common websites for one celebrity). Why would they do such a thing? Well, their strategy was basically to push out as many new apps as possible and get the early adopters to purchase. By taking advantage of the fact that nobody had reviewed their app, they were able to constantly dupe customers into buying their crappy products. And they were earning several thousand dollars a day. I think they had pushed like over a thousand apps in a year or so (I'm speaking from memory, I need to find the article on TechCrunch). In order words, this company gamed the system almost to perfection.

That was a rather interesting phenomena. And I think there are app development companies that are also trying to mimic this. So basically, the very aspects of the app store model that spurred so much innovation and interest was also a driving factor into a lot of crappy apps being developed. it'll be interesting how this pans out with the Ovi store and just with the general mobile app development space.