Smartphone wars – OS is the key
Gulliver, Mobile Bond, 11/23/2009
The mobile industry has seen a galore of models with several price ranges from the outnumbered manufacturing companies in the world. The never ending catalog of cell phones with the features people ever wished has flashed their stylish lifestyles and catered their all social needs as well. The associated high price tags may have limited the initial market structure of the cell phones being only confined to the wealthiest, but combining versatility and low cost for targeting the global market, the companies have managed to reach the bottom of the economic pyramid too.
The initial step in the field may have generated from the Zero generation back in 1908 but as technology paved its way breaking the shackles of extreme heavy weight and recalling base station addresses, Motorola finally launched the first hand held wireless mobile phone in 1973. But little had they thought that their invention would one day transform the whole mobile industry to an arena of portable handheld calling devices with computer like technology known globally as Smart Phones.
Well sitting down to define the term in one sentence would never reach a consensus. With integrated Operating System, miniature Qwerty keyboard, internet and email capabilities, in built camera, audio video media software, touch screen facility and so on, there is a protracted list of features with almost inexhaustible list for storing contacts. So it’s a diminutive computer on the go, guess a pretty close definition if not the most accurate.
IBM’s Simon marked the entry of smartphones in the mobile industry in 1993 followed by Nokia’s communicator series beginning with Nokia 9000 in 1996. As time swept by, and technology played its games, other manufacturers rolled in with more advanced features coupled with high price tags.
Nokia’s 9210 communicator became the first Symbion OS loaded smartphone in 2000 with camera, Wifi and GPS added soon after to Nokia’s following models. 2002 welcomed RIM’s Blackberry with wide opened arms stealing away a potential smartphone market with its wireless email functionality.
Microsoft the very same year launched its MS Windows powered smartphones called the Windows phones. Few years later in 2005 Nokia N series brought the multimedia smartphone revolution by flooding the market with its array of N series phones for all consecutive years with finally its N86 in 2009 with 8 MP camera, WLAN and GPS functionality. However in between Apple too joined the smartphone league with its iPhone in 2007 running on the iPhone OS and was crowned as Invention of the year by Time magazine. And finally heating up the smartphone war all the more, Google released Android, its open source OS platform for smartphones along with major hardware and software developers with HTC Dream to be the first privileged one operating on the Android platform.
Unfolding the smartphone history, we may notice that majority of the manufacturing companies like Nokia have relied considerably on the Symbian OS platform for their smartphones . RIM Blackberry and Apple iPhone have held onto their own OS platforms while Nokia has embedded Windows Mobile too in its handsets with HTC, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericson joining in. Well old players have always been the initial preference for more reliability, but Google’s Android has too succeeded to attract many.
According to figures released on 12th Nov, 09 by Gartner, world’s leading information technology research and advisory company Microsoft’s mobile OS witnessed a downfall from 11 % of the global smartphone market in Q3 2008 to 7.9 % later this year. The iPhone’s share saw a rise to 17.1 % from 12.9 %, and RIM’s share had risen from 16 percent to 20.8 percent. Symbian’s market share fell with 10% from 49.7 % to 44.6 % over the same period The new open-source Android operating system did not have any market share in Q3 2008, however, in Q3 2009, it had managed to capture 3.9 % of the smartphone market. Palm’s WebOS had 1.1 %, and other Linux-based mobile operating systems had 4.7 % Here is a graph that outlines the mobile OS market share in first quarter of 2009 and that predicted for the 4th quarter of year 2012 by Gartner Inc.
Flushing off its high amount of success through Razr back in 2004 and trying to catch on the lost pace with other competitors, Motorola made an acknowledged entry with its android based Motorola Cliq followed by Motorola Dext with a unique networking powerhouse in its Motoblur. Also joining hands with Verizon wireless and Google, Motorola Droid made an entry in the smartphone world on 6th Nov with Android 2.0.
On the other hand HTC made an explosive entry with its HTC Hero, the first Android supported Adobe flash phone and the third one in its Android series released by HTC Corp. few months earlier. Also the modified version of hero HTC Droid Eris has recently touched the market this month.
Sony Erricson Xperia range of mobile phones had opened the doors for Windows mobile OS in 2008 but now it’s Android phone Xperia X10 is ready to hit the market in 2010 with its automatic recognition feature of connection between contacts, content and media. Also adding on to its smartphone range is Sony Ericsson Kurara a Symbian phone lined up for release next year.
Appended to the list of announcements is ZTE Corp. planning to launch smartphones next year based on android platform. Dell too has introduced Android smartphones in Brazil and China. Also first 4G Android based smartphones are speculated to arrive from Sprint in 2010. Acer has been news too for its Android based liquid smartphones very soon. Sharp, the largest mobile manufacturer in Japan is also eyeing on Android platform for its phones to be launched in early 2010. I am sure I am missing out many of them as android fever seems to catch on the smartphone market.
Not ignoring the three generations of the Apple iPhone with 3G and 3Gs on second and third number, these smartphones managed to grab quite much attention and market acceptance in the consecutive years of their release. Apple sold 6.1 million original iPhone units over five quarters. The company sold 3.8 million iPhone 3G units by end of March 2009, and 12.6 million 3G and 3GS combined, totaling 33.75 million iPhones sold to date. Sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 surpassed temporarily those of RIM’s BlackBerry sales of 5.2 million units, which made Apple briefly the third largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue, after Nokia and Samsung. Android beating up this target will require considerate effort and time as iPhones continue to dominate much of the smartphone market.
Apart from this IDC’s latest shipment numbers reveal that the smartphone posted robust 4.2 percent year-over-year shipment growth in the third quarter of 2009. Nokia has been managing quite well on its own worldwide, continuing its lead in the sector with 37.9 The next closest competitors are Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, with 19 percent market share witnessing a whopping 37.5 percent year-over-year growth in shipments. Apple however bagged the third place with 7 percent growth with HTC seeing a 14.7 percent increase to grab 5.6 percent of the smartphone market
In another recent detailed report with few statistical differences Gartner lays out the worldwide smartphone sales to end users in 3Q 09 comparing them to those in 3Q 08. But here too, Nokia emerges as a clear winner with 39.3% of market share followed by rest as shown here.
“The third quarter of 2009 saw the announcement of many new mobile devices, including several Android smartphones ready for the holiday season in the fourth quarter, but hardware commoditisation and the growth in open platforms will make it harder for them to stand out….Smartphones continued to represent the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market and we remain confident about the potential for smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009 and in 2010,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner.
“Manufacturers should work to differentiate their user interfaces by creating distinct ways of organising users’ information and services,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. “However, they need to be careful to maintain application compatibility.”
Android is no doubt Google’s attempt to enter the lucrative market for smartphone operating systems. Currently, as we have seen the market is dominated by Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s Symbian Series 60, RIM’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Despite the economic slowdown, smartphones sales have seen some equilibrium with an expected mobile industry growth by 2011.
Goggle entering into the potential revenue generating market with an open source OS may help to draw out business to its mobile applications. So how far it succeeds to lure the mobile makers will only be visible on some timeline. All we may do right now is keep an eagle eye on the smartphone market and wait as graphs reveal new statistics of the smartphone war.
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In: Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Mobile Technology, Palm (HP), Symbian · Tagged with: 3G, Ericsson, GPS, HTC, Linux, Motorola, Nokia, WiFi
on November 23, 2009 at 8:00 pm
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