This will hardly be a vintage year for the mobile-phone industry. Gartner, a market-research firm, reckons global handset sales will shrink by around 4% to 1.2 billion units. Yet despite the gloom the industry is still pumping out new products. On June 6th Palm, a firm that pioneered hand-held digital devices, started selling a phone called the Pre. Two days later Apple unveiled souped-up versions of its popular iPhone.rnBoth firms are hoping to carve out bigger slices of the market for smart-phones. In addition to allowing people to make calls and check e-mail, these can run programs, or "apps", designed by third-party developers.
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