Apple's share price passed the $500 mark for the first time in the firm's history on Monday afternoon as the success of its iPad 2 and iPhone devices continue to make the firm one of the world's most valuable companies.

It has taken just six months since passing the $400 on the Nasdaq market to rocket to £500 and comes three years after the firm's share price was a comparatively paltry $89.31 in February 2009.

Since then the success of its iPhone and iPad ranges, particularly their increasing use among both consumers and business users, has fuelled the firm's valuation, which is now inching towards $470bn as it continues to rake in record profits.

The firm's financial success is in stark contrast to some of its key rivals, with the likes of Microsoft stagnating on $30 per share price - and a market cap of $256bn - and Nokia on just $5 a share or a $18.5bn market cap, as other firms find it hard to make any traction in the smartphone and tablet markets.

Only Google can outperform Apple for share-value, with its stock currently priced around the $613 mark, but with fewer shares it circulation, it's value is a 'paltry' $199bn.

The question everyone will be asking, though, is clear: why on earth didn't I buy some shares in Apple three years ago?

Mobile operator Three has revealed that a whopping 97 per cent of all its contract sales in September were for smartphones, declaring demand for feature phones all but "dead".

Phil Sheppard, the firm's director of network strategy, also revealed that a huge 75 per cent of the pay-as-you-go devices it sells are smartphones, despite the fact that they can cost up to £500 on a SIM-only deal.

"We have seen massive growth in the use of smartphones and internet-capable phones in the last 14 months. The feature phone market is dead," he said at a Westminster Forum event on Thursday.

The figures are an increase on the 92 per cent sales of smartphone contracts in December 2010 and 50 per cent sales of smartphones on pay-as-you-go deals.

The numbers are perhaps not surprising given the trend of consumers favouring smartphones, but the scale of the demand is somewhat staggering, and V3 is left wondering about the hardy three per cent doggedly sticking to their feature phones.

Perhaps it's the same people V3 noticed at the VMware event in Copenhagen who were carrying around a basic, indestructible Nokia to make calls, and using their iPhone for everything else because of the unpredictability of smartphones for voice calls.

Of course, there will no doubt be those who prefer to stick with feature phones given their simplicity, while figures from the larger network operators may give a better insight into the true demand for such devices.

But it won't be too long before the idea of playing Snake on a Nokia 3310 becomes as outdated as the mangle or horse and cart. One to tell the grandchildren about.

In what will undoubtedly be seen as yet another sign of the shifting global economic sands, China has topped the US in terms of quarterly PC sales for the first time, according to the latest stats from IDC.

The analyst firm recorded shipments of 18.5 million units in the People's Republic in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 17.7 million units in the US. The US is expected to end the year on top thanks to strong festive sales, but China will triumph in 2012 and, given its inexorable growth, for years to come.

IDC predicted that China will ship 85.2 million units compared to the US figure of 76.6 million in 2012, or a market share of 21.8 per cent versus 19.6 per cent.

"China's lead in the PC market is a huge shift that reflects the rising fortunes of emerging markets as well as the relative stagnation of more mature regions," said Loren Loverde, programme vice president at IDC's Worldwide PC Tracker.

"While the immediate economic circumstances in the US and other markets had a significant impact on the timing of China's move into the lead, they have not changed the trend, but accelerated it."

The stats come after a tough few months for the US and eurozone economies. The sovereign debt crisis in Europe is showing no signs of abating, while the US had its AAA credit rating downgraded for the first time in its history, as politicians foolishly turned the economy into a points scoring exercise and failed effectively to address the underlying problems.

It's not a massive overstatement, then, to say that the People's Republic of China has finally taken up its position as the preeminent global economic powerhouse.

This will mean different things for different businesses in different sectors, of course. However, across the board it should reinforce the notion among those who haven't done so already that a Chinese outpost is now a necessity, not a nice-to-have.

Aside from providing a neat little snapshot into the growing wealth of a nation whose economic potential has still not been realised, the growing number of PC users in China will have the pound signs flashing in the eyes of tech entrepreneurs everywhere.

Jeff Kim, COO of CDNetworks, a firm which helps content providers expand their presence in the region, was naturally optimistic of the opportunities that lay behind the IDC figures.

"This is clear evidence that China's growing middle class, already known for its strong consumerism, is also highly computer and internet literate," he told us.

"We see the trend continuing as evidenced by the recent high growth in the amount of web site and application content that we serve to Chinese internet users on behalf of our content provider customers."

The big name vendors have certainly wasted no time. Apple is reportedly building a cheaper version of its iPhone for emerging markets such as China, while Nokia chose Hong Kong on Wednesday as the venue to launch three Symbian Belle-based phones, which it hopes will make a big impact on these markets and help turn around its fortunes.

For those interested in tapping the vast Chinese market, however, there are still big barriers, and businesses would do well to keep their eyes fully open before taking the plunge, as we've highlighted before on Frontline. Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, can provide a useful hub and stepping stone from which to eventually expand operations into China.

However, firms that continue to procrastinate in expanding their bases into Asia and eventually China, in industries from publishing and accounting to finance and technology, will be left behind as their more agile and forward thinking competitors speed past. And rightly so.

The Symbian operating system is no longer open source, Nokia appears to have confirmed, as developers are now required to register for a licence to access the source code for the smartphone platform.

At the end of March, Nokia made available the latest version of the Symbian code for the first time after the Symbian Foundation ceased operations, and complete control of the platform effectively passed back to Nokia.

Petra Söderling, head of open source for Symbian smartphones, said that Nokia plans to ship at least 150 million Symbian smartphones and to continue software updates for the platform, and that Nokia needed the continued help of development partners to achieve this.

However, in an update on the Nokia Symbian blog, the company has now clarified that it is no longer maintaining Symbian as an open source development project.

"Consistent with this, the Nokia Symbian Licence is an alternative licence which provides access to Nokia's additional Symbian development for parties which collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform," the blog states.

Ominously, the blog goes on to say that "we are monitoring the registrations and approving the aforementioned platform collaborators only", which suggests that developers of third-party applications will be denied access to the source code.

The move comes just a year after the Symbian Foundation released the first fully open source version of the platform, and less than two months after Nokia announced it was adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform in place of Symbian.

UPDATE: Nokia said in a statment to V3.co.uk that the changes should not affect application developers.

"Developers who want to leverage the business opportunity for developing apps for Nokia devices and publishing them through Ovi Store are welcome to work with us at http://forum.nokia.com," the statement said.