O2's prize for the most innovative application has been awarded to a book about the iPhone, with a calendar and a voting application taking second and third place respectively.

The O2 Showdown was organised by O2's development effort Litmus, and was judged by O2 customers who volunteered to review shortlisted apps and vote for the most innovative - which explains why a book on how to use an iPhone scooped the £10,000 first prize, while the calendar gets a Playstation 3 and the voting app scores a Sony Ericsson C905 - a handset on which none of the selected applications will run.

Event Horizon is rather more innovative in that it displays upcoming appointments within a variable timeframe, though it is equally restricted to the iPhone. In fact the only application which could be distributed through O2 Litmus is Live Talkback - a voting application aimed at TV companies who are bored of collecting the profits obtained through text voting systems.

It's taken O2 a week to let us know the winners of the Showdown, which was supposed to have been judged by last Monday, and if we'd known the level of innovation we wouldn't have waited with such interest - but that's what happens when you let the customers select the winners. ®

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