It is certainly true that AppleTV has not taken on as predicted, but where do you place iPhone? I would think that it has been a great success, and IMO it's a new product, though it is also an iPod.

Anyway, the first iPod was launched in 23rd of October 2001, but iPods didn't really start selling great until the christmas of 2004, at what time Apple had lauched already the fouth generation of iPod Classics, and at the beginning of that year, iPod Mini, so it's a bit unfair to say that they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The smart phones prior to the iPhone were pretty terrible. The success of the iPhone is pretty much an indictment of how bad the competition was. Palm, MS, Nokia, etc have done a very bad job of making a user friendly phone that appeals to a broad audience.

Much like the iPod, Apple took advantage of the competition's weakness with the iPhone. I'm not seeing that same weakness with the DS. The DS is very user friendly and appeals to a broad audience.

And on top of that, the iPhone hasn't even captured the entire market as the iPod did. As I mentioned before, iPhone sales are only 20% or so of total smartphone sales on a month-by-month basis, mostly due to high cost and the even MORE expensive monthly fees.

Apple's sole advantage is their distribution model through the App Store.

If they can make a business model that costs less than Nintendo's AND attracts more customers then Nintendo can on their current model, they could kill the DS.

But I doubt they would try, since the first step is chopping the cost of the iPhone to "handheld game console" levels instead of "smart phone" levels.

I had to chuckle when I read this.  I hope I never work for you... I can't imagine the level of expectation you would place on me.

Apple is a relative newcomer to the smart-phone market.  They've basically released one iteration of one phone and are just now approaching 1 year in the market.  Already you expect them to have a lion share of that market.  The iPod didn't get 80% of the mp3-player market its first year or even its second.  It took several years.

I know some people seem to hate Apple (heck, I hate Apple in some ways), but that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that jumping into a market and grabbing 20% in the first year isn't impressive. 

In my opinion the smart phone/pda market vs. the handheld gaming market is similar to the PC market vs. the home console market ...

More and more people will need (choose) to carry around a smart phone/pda and this means that in the future many people will choose to play games using these devices. Now unless a smart phone/pda ends up controlling the market there will be noticeable differences between hardware and user interfaces which will frustrate developers, and most games will be developed for the lowest common denominator across all devices; this should result in games with (fairly) clumsy user interfaces that tend not to take advantage of the processing power of these devices.

At the same time Nintendo will be able to produce a new system which has an improved user interface and increased processing power; both of which will soon be taken advantage of by quality developers.

 Is it realy hard to write IMO at the end ?

But anyways , I agree . The Apple store will not take off . Dont get me wrong it will be beter then the new N-gage service but the lack of killer 1st party games wont let them break to the top ... 

I can't argue with you, FishyJoe.  Apple has definitely exploited obvious weaknesses in the market (no one seemed to be able to get the major record labels to really loosen up, but Jobs made it happen).  But remember, Nintendo isn't made of Teflon... the previous console generation demonstrated that.  My guess is that Apple will bide its time, honing its ability to get applications on the iPod and iPhone, then if an opening presents itself in the next generation of handhelds, Apple might pounce.

"Might" pounce.  Then again, they might not.

So, can Apple crush the DS?  I don't see how.  Can they win or become a strong competitor in the next generation of handhelds?  I wouldn't rule them out.

Time will tell. 

one word...... Ngage

You make a good point, but I have to disagree that a single vendor needs to dominate to bring development cohesion to smartphones.  As the smartphone market matures, high-level languages such as embedded Java could provide a nice layer of abstraction on ever more powerful hardware.  This would be very similar to the current PC environment where you have lots o' hardware manufacturers, but one development/presentation standard.  I'm not saying one smart-phone OS will prevail, but that having a similar language environment with "enough" hardware horsepower could allow straightforward ports of games throughout the smart-phone market.

This would allow specific vendors to create product differentiation via better gui's, control-button placement, game performance, screens, etc.