According to Dial-a-Phone, LG’s touchscreen phone Viewty (KU990) is outselling the iPhone in UK. Viewty was also launched in early November and has sold 310,000 units. The Viewty has outperformed sales of the already successful and less costly Chocolate and Shine lines.  Though there is no sales figure available for the iPhone in UK, Dial-a-Phone says that the LG Viewty is outselling iPhone. The problem with Dial-a-Phone’s statement is that they don’t have any data on iPhone sales, plus they were excluded from iPhone’s sales strategy. The company also said “the iPhone interface and usability are amazing but Apple’s greed has resulted in the iPhone sales falling way short of its potential”. Now this looks like a wound they are trying to lick and not  iPhone sales problem. There are no concrete sales data for iPhone but then also analysts and Companies like Dial-a-Phone are saying that iPhone sales are disappointing in UK. Neither Apple nor O2 have ever said what their sales goals were for November and December, then how can one say that they have not reached their sales goals. News like this is rumor rather than fact.

The iPhone has grabbed 27% of all smartphone sells in North America and the iphone is yet not released in Canada and Mexico. The other big thing is only AT&T is selling iPhones where as the other mobile platforms are sold by all wireless carriers present in North America. The numbers reached by iPhone in just one full quarter of sell shows the influence iPhone will have on all the up coming smartphones. These numbers indicate that Apple outsold all Windows Mobile smartphones and Symbian phone combined in US for Q3 of 2007. The numbers are particularly embarrassing for Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer who announced in a TV interview in January that Apple wouldn’t capture more then two to three percent of the market and laughed at the cost of the iPhone, he described his own Windows Mobile platform as having or soon acquiring 60 to 80% of the smartphone market. Its not just the number of iPhones sold, the Mobile Browser Stats for November 2007 showed iPhone at 47%, whereas the Windows CE had just 32% even though it has been selling with mobile browser for more then 5 years. So a product that was launched 5 months back is reaching 50% mark in mobile browser share. That is a serious problem for all the companies that were designing smartphone browsers.

The Screen Sharing feature of iChat in Leopard is one of the most useful features. The Screen Sharing is based on Apple’s Remote Desktop package. Apple’s Remote Desktop Application can be used to maintain multiple computer but you have to pay $500 to buy the software. Luckily Apple left at least some of that functionality in the more-limited screen sharing application, which is disabled by default in Leopard. Macworld has posted complete instruction to activate these functionalities on your Mac. You should definitely check out complete details at MacWorld’s website.

We have seen few software based global positioning systems for iPhone. Part Foundry has announced first true GPS module that works with jail broken iPhone. The module will ship in February for $89. All software is open source and new applications are bring written for the module. The module is small enough to put on a keychain and has all the benefits that GPS provides. For more information about the GPS module check Part Foundry’s website.