Smartphone OS Platform Supremacy
Over the last year, smartphones have gone from an exclusive tool for the always connected businessman (and technologically-inclined geeks), to a mainstream gadget. Everyone (and by everyone I mean the average Joe consumer) is awed by the iPhone and it’s apps. It’s a portal to the Internet. It’s a portal to social networking, further solidifying the mobile phone as our link to friends and family. Also, it’s a novelty. It’s got a fancy touch screen (with pinch to zoom no less!), and thousands of useless apps and a few cool ones. Here’s the thing though. Technophiles have had this core functionality for years on smartphones/PDAs for most of this decade. What pushed the iPhone into the mainstream and made consumers aware of this technology? Ease of use, a friendly UI, a nice price-point ($200), and Apple “cool and hip” branding was the sorcery used. The smartphone is now for the everyman (that can afford an outrageously priced data plan). OK, so maybe at least for a vastly greater percentage of the population than the Treo 600 was.
So now everyone and their social-networking-happy little brother wants a smartphone, and handset makers are eager to sell them one. Palm, the veteran, was bloody and beaten, but they revamped their platform and introduced WebOS. Now the Palm Pre is out there clawing for market share, and is a damned good first generation device. Google has shown it’s prowess by launching Android, an open source platform freely available to handset-makers. It was slow to catch on, but now there’s a whole slew of devices at the ready, and their market share is sure to grow. Nokia, the elder giant of the group, is still holding strong… in Europe. Its aging Symbian needs a revamping or the new kids will beat it off the map. RIM, makers of the BlackBerry, are now the fastest growing company in the world apparently. They had the highest marketshare in the US smartphone market in Q1 2009, mostly because of the cheap-as-dirt Curve 8300 and Pearl 8100. Windows Mobile… Honestly, Windows Mobile would be nothing right now were it not for HTC and Samsung. The platform, currently at 6.5, has not been revamped in ages, and is really starting to look antiquated next to all the others. Windows Mobile 7 is really not getting here fast enough. Corporations love its integration with Exchange,and that seems to be keeping it alive.
Now the battle of titans is at hand. These companies are all trying to outdo each other with each new phone and platform update. I’ve read a lot of technology bloggers stating that there are too many players in the market, that some will die off. and we’ll have only two or three survivors. What I’m saying is I think they’re wrong. Before, the market could only support 2 or 3 players (Symbian, Windows Mobile, and PalmOS), but then again smartphone sales were nothing compared to now. I’d like to make an analogy with other industries. The past three decades have shown that the games industry can only support three console platforms. Households share a console; there’s not a console per family member, they share one. The home video industry only supports one player, VHS or Betamax, DVD or Laserdisc, HD-DVD or Blu-ray. However, mobile phones are a different story. Every person (ideally) would have a phone. As smartphone prices lower and smartphones eventually become the norm, the sheer size of the market, I believe, is enough to sustain quite a few platforms. Why can’t we have six competing platforms? Don’t we have way more car manufacturers? With more competition comes more innovation and better products. Personally, I welcome that.
