Las Vegas (NV) - Ever since Apple first showed its iPhone in January of 2007, cellphone makers appear to have accelerated their innovation efforts to create new types of phones or at least phones that offer the same appeal as the iPhone. This year’s CTIA tradeshow revealed that the iPhone will remain the benchmark of a mass market smartphone, while all other manufacturers are still catching up. But they are learning and are getting closer.

It feels like the iPod all over again. There is an industry that has been making cellphones for quite a while, but it was Apple that has opened a whole new market and enthusiasm for what is essentially a boring product category that is, at least in this country, focused on voice and data usability. The iPhone hardly can be considered a new product and has many flaws, but Apple got a lot of things right simply by looking at the market, talking to people, correcting mistakes others have made for years and coming up with a fantastic design that was years ahead of its competition. Looking at the news that are coming out of CTIA, this scenario looks very similar to what happened with the iPod back in 2001 and if Apple can repeat history, then the iPhone could become the iPod of cellphones.

Virtually every major handset maker scrambles to develop iPhone-killer these days but only three (maybe four) may have a decent shoot at accomplishing this goal: RIM with its BlackBerry 9000, Samsung with its Instinct phone and SonyEricsson with the Xperia. There is a wildcard in this game, which has the potential to make a strong debut – Garmin’s Nuvifone.

All these new smartphones are powerful, but they lack certain Apple-patented technologies, such as multi-finger gestures and an accelerometer or proximity sensor. However, they do set the bar higher in terms of plain hardware specs. It is very obvious that aim to beat the iPhone at its own game and to improve the device’s weaknesses and offer features such as 3G support, GPS, video recording, higher resolution screens, memory card slots, user-replaceable batteries, haptic feedback and physical, slide-out QWERTY keypads (Xperia).

It is interesting to see that all these devices don’t hide the fact that the they are ripping off some of the iPhone’s most obvious assets – they similar in shape, design and touchscreen size, with shiny graphics and fluidly animated UI, But it is our impression that these would-be iPhone-killers still fail to capture Apple’s mojo: Ease of use, an appealing user interface, seamless hardware/software integration and the brand appeal. At least Samsung and SonyEricsson have come up witchy catchy names for their new phones. The industry is closing the gap, but it isn’t quite there yet.

After flashy announcements made earlier this year we had the chance to look at the Nuvifone and the Xperia X1 at CTIA. Our first impression was that the SonyEricsson’s contender is actually a phone that looks great in real life, with a curved slide up screen, its QWERTY keyboard, 3" touchscreen display, 3G support, a 3.2 megapixel camera and a GPS. The manufacturer had only demo phones with fake screens on display, but we managed to get our hands on a working demo. However, we were not allowed to actually take a video of the phone, as we were told that the “software was incomplete” and only the main features were functional. No showtime for the Xperia X1 yet.