Like an oversized backside trying to find a comfy spot on a new sofa, Apple appears to be wriggling its way into the mobile phone arena, and has targeted this market as the next springboard towards world domination.

Recent figures show that, solely through its iPhone, Apple has worked its way into the top 10 mobile phone manufacturers list for 2007. Despite only commanding a worldwide market share of 0.6 percent (compare this to Nokia's 40.4 percent) it's an impressive achievement considering the phone is only available in the UK, US, Germany and France.

At a recent Apple event, Steve Jobs and co. attempted to paint the future of mobile phones gloss white by claiming that the iPhone would eventually dominate the mobile market in a similar way to Google in the search and advertising sector.

These bold claims were backed up by ‘expert' analysis that defined the future of mobile phones as ‘platforms', offering access to Web-browsing, e-mail, games and applications. Hardly anything ground-breaking here, then, and they'll certainly have a fight on their hands from rivals such as Nokia, which has arguably trumped the iPhone in the functionality stakes with its excellent 8GB N95, among others.

The recent release of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) has opened up the phone for further development, though, so the touch paper seems to have been lit already. It'll be interesting to see how Nokia and others develop the interface on future mobiles to compete.