The Wall Street Journal has published on Monday a very interesting interview with Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. Jobs said that its AppStore, a website which offers downloadable programs for iPhone is a huge success and more than 60 million applications have been downloaded in just one month.

Jobs noted that although most of the applications are free, the downloads were bringing in an average of 1 million dollars per day, and predicted that eventually the business could generate one billion dollars annually. "I've never seen anything like this in my career for software," he told the paper.

Apple allows third party developers to post their applications to the App Store after they have been vetted for reliability by Apple technicians. Developers can charge up to $1,000 per download, with 30 per cent of the fee going to Apple.

Among the most popular paid downloads is Sega's Super Monkeyball game, which sells for 10 dollars. It allows players to guide an orb around mazes by tilting their iPhones and has sold over 300,000 copies in a month.

"That's a substantial business," said Sega executive Simon Jeffery. "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform."

Steve Jobs sees AppStore as the feature that could differentiate the iPhone from the similar cell phones offered by rivals like Google, Samsung and Nokia.

"Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that," Jobs said. "We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software."

Google is working on its own universal mobile platform, called Android, but it is unknown when the first models base on the new operating system will hit the market.

There were various reports saying that the first Android phones will hit the market in 2009 instead of the second half of this year as Google intended.

Nokia has also announced an iPhone killer, called Nokia Tube. In April Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia confirmed that the Finnish company is working on its first touch screen phone which will include support for the DVB-H mobile TV standard for Europe and mobile video.

According to Libretto, the Nokia Tube will include also a feature which will allow its users to upload to the web, which means that the new device will integrate Wi-Fi or HSDPA connectivity. Unfortunately, Libretto didn’t indicate any release timeframe for this new phone.

In other news, Steve Jobs also confirmed that Apple had installed a secret piece of software on the iPhone that would allow the company to remotely disable malicious applications.

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he said.