There are only a handful of legitimate smartphone operating system contenders on the world stage: RIM with the Blackberry, Nokia with its Symbian, Apple with the iPhone, and Palm with its Pre, Microsoft with Windows Mobile, and Google with Android, as major examples. And, unlike mobile handsets, which declined to 286M units (down 6.1% from a year earlier) in Q2 2009, smartphone sales were up by 27% Quarter over Quarter to 41M units (based on a recent report issued by Gartner). Nokia has been losing smartphone market share to Apple, RIM and Google.
So, any major software or architecture changes among Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, Palm, Google are going to be worth noting.
According to anonymous sources at Nokia, as reported by the Financial Times of Germany, Nokia, which paid €264M (~$400M) for Symbian just 4 months ago, will now outfit many if not all of its smartphones with a primarily open-source OS called Maemo that it currently uses in its Internet tablets. Mind you, as TechCrunch notes, Nokia has spent billions ($8 BILLION for Navteq alone) over the last 4 years and very little of it has been productively integrated or used, so €264M for Symbian isn’t so bad.
FTD quotes a source close to Nokia saying: “Symbian is much too cumbersome to keep up with modern operating systems. We have to react.” Symbian supposedly has 20,000,000 lines of code and is way too unwieldy in a fast-paced environment where Nokia has to imitate Apple more rapidly than its current architecture allows (hence the lag time in copying the touchscreen-based iPhone).
Couple the Maemo / Nokia smartphone news with the recent announcement (as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal) with Microsoft that the companies will develop a mobile version of Microsoft’s Office suite of software that works on Nokia cellphones, and it’s looking pretty grim for good ole Symbian…
Editor’s Note: GigaOm has an article with additional market share information for Microsoft, Nokia, Apple and others.
Update: If there was any doubt how serious Google is about the mobile space, check out their announcement this morning that they will release ChromeOS to compete against Windows. Google understands and is dead serious about that they need to be able to provide / own the user experience from top-to-bottom. Android is that play in mobile, Chrome OS on the PC.
Even although Nokia outrightly denied that they would abandon Symbian for Android, it certainly got people’s attention. And for good reasons.
Over the history of computing, there has never been a market that was dominated by 5 major players over an extended period of time. Do we have 5 major client operating systems today? No. Enterprise OS’es? No. 5 major databases? No. 5 major browsers? No again. With the users and the developers being the kingmakers, markets always have and continue to consolidate.
So why would we have 5 major smartphone platforms? We won’t. That is why I took the strong stance that the Palm Pre will fail. Of the 5 majors in the smartphone market, two seem to be relatively safe: Apple and RIM, maker of the Blackberry, since they target slightly different subsets of the smartphone market. Of the remaining three, Android will make it, since it is not only going to be in smartphones, but also in MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices, such as tablets, netbooks,…) Besides, Google must win in Mobile and Android is their platform to do so. Which leaves us with Symbian, which is going the open source route, but has not seen that much pickup from developers, and Microsoft, whom I cannot see walking away from this market.
Personally, I doubt that Nokia will go the Android route or that Microsoft is going to take over RIM, but that is not what matters. What matters is that the shakeout is starting and not everyone will be standing when this is over. Until then, be prepared to hear rumors, announcements, speculations and analyses. And you might just get surprised at what the outcome turns out to be.
Even although Nokia outrightly denied that they would abandon Symbian for Android, it certainly got people’s attention. And for good reasons.
Over the history of computing, there has never been a market that was dominated by 5 major players over an extended period of time. Do we have 5 major client operating systems today? No. Enterprise OS’es? No. 5 major databases? No. 5 major browsers? No again. With the users and the developers being the kingmakers, markets always have and continue to consolidate.
So why would we have 5 major smartphone platforms? We won’t. That is why I took the strong stance that the Palm Pre will fail. Of the 5 majors in the smartphone market, two seem to be relatively safe: Apple and RIM, maker of the Blackberry, since they target slightly different subsets of the smartphone market. Of the remaining three, Android will make it, since it is not only going to be in smartphones, but also in MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices, such as tablets, netbooks,…) Besides, Google must win in Mobile and Android is their platform to do so. Which leaves us with Symbian, which is going the open source route, but has not seen that much pickup from developers, and Microsoft, whom I cannot see walking away from this market.
Personally, I doubt that Nokia will go the Android route or that Microsoft is going to take over RIM, but that is not what matters. What matters is that the shakeout is starting and not everyone will be standing when this is over. Until then, be prepared to hear rumors, announcements, speculations and analyses. And you might just get surprised at what the outcome turns out to be.
American Photo just announced their Editor’s Choice Awards for 2009 and not surprisingly, the iPhone did not win in the “Camera Phone of the Year” category. That award went to the Sony Ericsson C905A Cyber-shot (see picture), with the runner-ups being the LG KC910 Renoir, the Nokia N97, the Motorola Motorzine ZN5 and the Samsung SGH-T929 Memoir.
The iPhone 3G actually has some state-of-the-art features that (some of) these winning phones have: GPS geotagging and taking the shot when removing the finger from the camera button, not when pressing it. Plus, the iPhone 3GS will add auto-focus by touching the screen where you want to focus on.
But in order to win, the iPhone would have to include some additional features, including:
- high-quality Zeiss lens
- (digital) image stabilization, similar to the ProCamera app
- face-, smile- and blink-detection
- light sensitivity setting (up to ISO 1600)
- burst, macro and panorama modes
- spot metering
- manual settings
- HDR (High Dynamic Range) support
- more megapixels (as long as they are “good” megapixels)
Interestingly, many of these missing features could be incorporated through a combination of software and firmware updates. Maybe Apple is saving these for the “iCamera” that Joe wrote about on this blog recently?
