Smartphone OS - battle for dominance

The smartphone market is growing exponentially every year. Some analysts estimate that smartphones account for 25% of all mobile phones sold today. This is likely to increase significantly over the next several years.

The battle for dominance, and in some cases, survival in the Smartphone OS market is reaching a decisive stage. Android and iPhone have the momentum at present, followed by Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Linux is fast losing traction in the smartphone market and may eventually be a non-player in this market segment. And, of course, one cannot dismiss the Palm OS which has received some good reviews, and has a strong presence in the US smartphone market. In the US market, RIM holds the No.1 spot in the smartphone category, followed by iPhone.

iPhone is the most popular OS platform for third party application development today. However, it is a semi-closed system and Apple has not licensed its OS to other device manufacturers. Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, on the other hand, are open OS platforms that have been licensed to a number of device manufacturers. Mobile devices based on these OS platforms are available from a number of vendors. On the other hand, Blackberry OS is available only from RIM.

Symbian leads the worldwide smartphone market today with 40% to 50% market share, but its market share has been steadily declining over the last few years. Symbian dominates in Europe, but has limited presence in the US. Symbian is an OS that has been designed and optimized specifically to run on mobile devices, and has undergone a lot of changes over the last several years. Until recently, there were multiple variants of the OS; UIQ, S60 and MOAP. Today, Symbian is owned by Nokia and there is only version (S60). The Symbian OS is open source and is freely available to interested developers. The current version of the OS is v3, which corresponds to S60 5^th Edition (actually Symbian v1 corresponds to S60 5^th Edition). Symbian OS uses a microkernel architecture, which contains a minimum set of OS functions. This is supported by a set of servers that provide other required functionality (networking, file system mgt, telephony services, etc). Symbian programming is done in C++; developing prototypes and demos is easy and efficient in Symbian.

Windows Mobile, which some pundits had initially predicted would take over the smartphone OS market (ie., a repeat of Windows’ success in the PC OS market), has been losing market share and momentum to Android over the last year. In an effort to reverse this trend, Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned version of the OS called Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress in February. This new OS is based on the Windows CE 6 kernel. It has a completely new UI, Outlook and Office support, and Zune and Xbox support. However, this OS has stringent hardware requirements for third party device manufacturers such as large WVGA screen with a single aspect ratio, accelerometer, FM radio, WiFi, AGPS, 5 (no more, no less) specific hardware buttons, including one for Bing Search. Mandating a specific button for Bing is an aggressive attempt to promote its search engine (over Google’s search engine). The first set of smartphones based on Windows Phone 7 are due to be released towards the end of this year. The jury is still out on whether Windows Phone 7 will salvage Microsoft’s standing in the smartphone OS market. So far, Windows OS has not generated the level of excitement and interest among the application developer community that we have seen for iPhone and Android.

Google’s Android OS is based on Linux. It was developed by Android Inc, which was acquired by Google. Android supports third party application development using Java, and the Android SDK includes a number of Java libraries. However, Android uses a non-standard version of Java (not the standard Java ME), thereby making applications written in standard Java incompatible with the Android Java environment. The Android OS is available as open source to third party developers. There are at least 20-30 phone models on the market today that use the Android OS. This year is expected to see an exponential increase in the number of Android based phones in the market.

Palm OS, which has received positive reviews from industry experts, is based on Linux and has incorporated many of the Web 2.0 functionality. It has a limited market share and is not expected to be an important player in the smartphone OS market.

The Blackberry OS is a proprietary multi-tasking smartphone OS developed by RIM for Blackberry devices. RIM provides a set of APIs for application developers. This OS runs exclusively on Blackberry devices, and occupies the No.1 spot in the US smartphone OS market.

There is another smartphone OS worth mentioning – Maemo. This is a Linux based OS developed by Nokia. However, at the Mobile World Congress in February, Nokia announced that it was merging the Maemo project with Moblin (Mobile Linux developed by the Linux Foundation) to create a new smartphone OS called MeeGo.

As the smartphone market evolves, it is very likely that the top 3 OS platforms will be iPhone, Android and the proprietary Blackberry. iPhone and Android platforms are expected to attract the largest number of third party application developers. Symbian and Windows may continue to see market share erosion, and some level of consolidation can be expected in the smartphone OS market in the long run.