Score two for openness. And score one for healthy competition. (And scroll to the end of this article for a video of the N810 side by side with iPhone).

I use my iPhone as much as a psuedo-Internet tablet as I do a phone, thanks in part to Apple's Safari and Mail apps and thanks in part to a host of thus-unsupported third party apps I had to hack onto the device. Whatever the reasons for not supporting third-party apps before now, Apple seems to have seen/acknowledged the light at long last in announcing some developer tools for the iPhone platform. iPhone is pretty awesome as is, but the robust developer community has really made it that much better even without Steve's blessing (or help). Good days surely lie ahead for what could prove to be Apple's next franchise.

Before iPhone came along, I had a Nokia N770 Internet Tablet. It was interesting, but not nearly polished or featured enough to be of that much use. Still, the idea of a networked device stronger than a phone but smaller than a laptop had its appeal. The N810 is the third generation of Nokia's tablet line and on first glance it's got a lot going for it. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, WVGA touchscreen, slide out QWERTY board, and a host of pretty nice looking applications including a Mozilla browser with full Flash support - yes, you can watch YouTube on it - and both Skype and Gizmo clients for text/voice/video conferencing. The N810 is a little bigger and thicker than iPhone, but also offers much greater screen resolution (800 x 480 vs 480 x 320).

N810 isn't a phone, however - it's an Internet device through and through, and needs a WiFi network or Bluetooth-tethered cellular modem (like a 3G phone) to get online. All that will change sometime in the first half of next year when Nokia releases a WiMax-enabled tablet that will be compatible with Sprint's forthcoming "Xohm" WiMax rollout. By then we could see some kind of Internet/Skype/Cellular monster device in the N-Series lineup. Well, a mini-monster, anyway.

The really interesting thing today, though, was what the Nokia folks said about Apple. Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President for Multimedia at Nokia, made no bones about his company's newly emergent relationship to Apple. "We are competing with Apple on all fronts with all cylinders," he remarked. "There is a very deep philosophical difference between us and Apple ... we're all about openness ... we encourage people to tamper with our devices." Indeed, the N-Series tablets have to this point been as much about growing a developer community as they've been about moving units. Vanjoki also made it clear that the N810 is not yet a mainstream gadget, declaring, "This will not be Nokia's most successful product," but rather a product for the "Tech Leaders," a group positioned as a stepping stone from the Ultra Geeks who bought the N770 and the mainstream consumers who are interested in other Nokia products.

Given Jobs' almost simultaneous announcement of the iPhone SDK, that difference might not seem to run quite so deep on the surface, but Nokia's encouragement of independent developers for the N tablets stands in stark contrast to Apple's resistance to help a would-be iPhone programmer out - at least until today (well, February, really). The flip side of the issue is that Apple has made a fortune by providing a very controlled, very high quality user experience from hardware to software to packaging, and such fine tailoring of how a product like iPhone works demands a certain amount of control. Apple's strategy on recent handheld gadgets - iPod and iPhone - has been to lock the platform down to give the mainstream user the smoothest experience possible, even if it ticks some of the Ultra Geeks off. Jobs and Co. have become very, very good at rolling open-source and independently developed technologies into OS X for the Mac, so it'll be really interesting to see how OS X for iPhone develops once that SDK starts making the rounds.

Nokia, on the other hand, has actively courted the Ultra Geeks not only with the N tablets' Linux platform, but also with the developer-friendly S60 smartphone environment. Now that the Finnish giant has made some serious moves to become a Web 2.0 experience provider (under the banner of their new "Ovi" brand) as well as a hardware manufacturer, it will be really interesting to see if they can cobble their various business acquisitions and realms of expertise into an Apple-esque user experience suited to the mainstream user and Ultra Geek alike. This morning made it seem like that's where Nokia's headed, even if the N810 was only the third "milestone" in a five step plan to bring their Internet Tablet into the true realm of the mainstream.

Meantime Nokia execs talk about Apple at press events and Apple execs are now talking about Nokia in open letters. Check out Steve's note regarding 3rd Party apps on iPhone for a little name dropping, some thoughts about how to open platforms to developers while still fighting malware and, perhaps, a slight dig at Nokia's recent "More Open than Apple," campaign.

Whatever your take on the best route to a robust, secure, developer-supported platform, one thing's for certain. As Vanjoki said himself this morning, "You can't stop innovation."