Steve Jobs’ Californian kit maker, Apple, may be a relative newcomer to the world of mobile communications, but one thing it’s got going for it is brand awareness.

Brandchannel, owned by brand consultancy Interbrand, said that Apple swept the board at its annual brandjunkie awards. The maker of the iPhone topped the charts as brand that consumers ‘cannot live without’, which is interesting given that the company’s most famous product is probably the iPod.

Granted I carry an iPod around with me pretty much everywhere, but I carry my phone around with me more that that, and the phone maker’s logo is probably the brand I see more times in one day than any other. So it actually surprised me to see that the more ‘familiar’ mobile phone brands – to those in the telecoms industry anyway – didn’t get a look in.

What also surprised was that Apple also secured the top rank in five other categories, including ‘most inspiring brand’, ‘Brand that you most want to sit next to at a dinner party’, ‘Brand with which you most identify’, ‘Brand most likely to revolutionize the branding industry in the next five years’, and ‘Brand that would have the biggest impact on the course of history if sent back 100 years’.

Sony’s reputation as an electronics giant got it a couple of mentions, but it always lagged a long way behind Apple, while Microsoft won the rather dubious titles of ‘Brand that you want to rebrand’ and ‘Brand with which you want to argue’, positioning the Redmond Giant as the polar opposite to Apple’s embodiment of cool. I remember there were some concerns about the success of the iPhone outside of the US because of brand awareness, but it sounds like Jobs and co. have got nothing to worry about, at least in terms of brand presence anyway.

So I’m interested to see what handset brands our readers can’t live without: