MOBILE PHONES:Just when you thought you had the coolest mobile on the block, along comes a new wave of smart devices

GET READY for a long summer of mobile phone envy. A new crop of phones from Apple, Palm and Nokia is redefining the concept of the phone, and putting the power of a laptop in your pocket.

The iPhone 3G S, Palm Pre and Nokia N97 are such an advance on what the industry has for years dubbed smartphones, that they have prompted some commentators to call them “superphones”.

With always-on connectivity – whether through Wi-Fi or 3G – they are driving mobile usage of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and making it easy to share and view relatively high quality photos and videos on the move.

This is all being driven by the iPhone, the iconic gadget from computer maker Apple, which, despite technical limitations, has redefined what people expect from a top-of-the-line phone. The key to Apple’s success – it has sold over 21 million iPhones in the last two years – is ease of use.

With its 3.5 inch touchscreen and single button, the iPhone looked nothing like a mobile but, with Apple’s customary attention to design and user interface, even the most committed luddites have found it simple to use.

That simplicity comes in part because Apple tightly controlled both the hardware and software of the iPhone. It was on the market a year before Apple provided a way for third parties to distribute software to it, but the AppStore, part of iTunes, has now been copied by competitors including Nokia, Google, Blackberry-maker RIM, Microsoft and LG.

Although it raises the stakes, the iPhone 3G S, which goes on sale here next Friday, is an evolution of the popular device rather than a radical departure.

In fact, with the release of the third version of the iPhone operating system, which began to be pushed out automatically to existing iPhone owners earlier this week, many of the features can be achieved through a simple software upgrade. These include the ability to cut, copy and paste between applications (an amazing omission up to now), enhanced search, improved parental controls over purchased content and the Find My iPhone feature, which pinpoints a lost phone on a map.

Despite being the world’s biggest maker of mobile handsets, Nokia has been forced to respond to Apple’s dominance of the top end of the market. While its N-series of multimedia phones, in particular the N95 8GByte, have offered superior features to the iPhone, such as a five-megapixel camera, they have been hampered by a complex user interface.

The N97, which combines a responsive high resolution touchscreen with a slide-out mini-qwerty keyboard, is its latest effort to craft an iPhone-killer – and looks to have a real chance of success.

The combination of a highly accurate GPS chip and social networking software could provide the winning combination for Nokia. The company maintains the N97 will be a mass-market device rather than a high-end one.

A surprise player in all this is Palm. Although best known on this side of the Atlantic for its personal digital assistants (PDAs), which were a must-have for executives in the 1990s, it was actually a serious player in the nascent smartphone market in the US.

Recent financial travails saw it lose that lead, but its private equity backers installed Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive, as executive chairman and last week he took over as chief executive.

Rubinstein built a team of 250 engineers, many from Apple, and told them to come up with a phone that would challenge the iPhone. Although still only available in the US, the Pre has received rave reviews and sold a reported 100,000 devices in its first weekend on sale.

Taken as a category, these three devices are delivering what the mobile industry has been promising for a decade or more – a truly portable computing experience that fits in your pocket. Their accompanying stores for buying additional software and content have provided a shot of innovation to the software industry. Gadget lovers are set to be the main beneficiaries as the big three fight to become mobile top dog.