Highly rated smartphones iPhone 4 and BlackBerry Torch 9800 bit dust at the Pwn2Own hacking competition while Samsung Nexus S, which runs on Android, and the Dell Venue, which runs on Windows Phone 7, came away unscathed.

While legendary hacker Charlie Miller unravelled the iPhone, it was a multi-national team of researchers that took down the BlackBerry. According to Computer World, the team consisted of Vincenzo Iozzo, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and another researcher from the Netherlands.

Pwn2Own is an annual computer hacking contest organized by HP TippingPoint, since 2007 at the CanSecWest security conference. Earlier in the contest this year, hackers broke through the Internet Explorer8 and Safari running on MacBook Air.

The iPhone and BlackBerry Torch hacks were over in seconds, Computer World reported. They hooked up their computers to the phones, and that was it, according to Peter Vreugdenhil, a former Pwn2Own winner and TippingPoint official.

Teen hacking sensation George Hotz stayed away from the contest this year as he is mired in a legal fight with Sony over his PS3 exploits. Had he attended he would have gone for Windows Phone 7.

The report said hackers who were scheduled to prise open the Samsung Nexus S and the Dell Venue did not show up. Mozilla Firefox also stood tall among the browser and smartphone ruins as a would-be hacker stayed away.

The winning contestants will get a cash prize as well as the devices they broke open, but they are forbidden from releasing the details of their exploits.

For each successful exploit, the contest's sponsor, TippingPoint, provides a report to the applicable vendor, detailing the vulnerability and how it was exploited. The details are not released to the public until the vendor has corrected the vulnerability, says a Wikipedia entry.

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