This NYT covers a somewhat surprising development in the smartphone market: it’s now a fight between relative newcomer Apple and corporate darling Research In Motion (i.e., the makers of Blackberry). Stalwart Palm and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile are at best also-rans, and tiny Symbian never really had a chance.

The key bit, which could fortell hard times for RIM, is this:

(RIM co-CEO) Mr. Balsillie thinks that R.I.M. is in the best tactical position for the coming fight. He points to its close relationships with 350 carriers around the world — like Verizon and AT&T — that sell, often at steep discounts, BlackBerry phones and the accompanying monthly e-mail service.

Apple and Google, on the other hand, are vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market. Unlike other phone makers in the United States, Apple sells iPhones from its own stores and has negotiated relatively stingy contracts with the carriers, in exchange for limited periods of exclusivity. Google, for its part, unsuccessfully bid for wireless spectrum this year in an effort to force carriers to be more open to allowing various handsets and Internet services on their networks.

R.I.M. makes its alliances clear. “We are sort of polite and amiable and we gently interrelate with the carriers and try to find compatibility,” Mr. Balsillie said. “It may be a better strategy to fight the carrier. We may be wrong. The carrier may get disintermediated, in which case we fade with them.”

In other words, R.I.M. is content to please carriers, not actual customers. Apple has turned that whole ecosystem on its ear by creating a phone that has literally made AT&T’s year, financially, because people wanted it People actually LIKE it. On the other hand, people with Blackberries are typically folks who have never touched another smartphone, and who use what their IT drone tells them to use. Of the non-corporate BB users I know, most have switched to the iPhone for sheer ease of use and lack of hassle.

It’s important to note that the Blackberry system is dependent on R.I.M.’s servers to work, even for private, ISP-based emails (unless you just use the browser to access a webmail account); the iPhone forces no such Rube Goldberg mechanism on its users (though neither do the offerings from Palm, WinMo, and Symbian). Up to now, R.I.M. was also the only real game in town for centrally-controllable mobile email; a lost Blackberry can be wiped remotely, over the air, by an administrator. This summer, that feature — along with holy-grail native Exchange support — comes to the iPhone, which means Apple is seriously bringing it to what has been R.I.M.’s essentially uncontested territory.