New research from ABI Research says Microsoft wil face an uphill battle for acceptance of its mobility platforms, and predict Symbian OS will likely remain in lead until 2010.
Despite inroads by Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS, which has demonstrated success with Motorola among other handset vendors recently, ABI Research believes that Symbian OS will continue to lead the market for mobile phone standardized operating systems.
In a market that is still driven by proprietary OSes, on the order of 98% this year, Symbian, Microsoft and Linux are fighting over a small portion of the total handset market. But 2% of handsets shipped - essentially all handsets defined as "smartphones" - still amount to about 10 million handsets a year. And ABI Research predicts that smartphones and WAN handhelds will represent nearly a quarter of all handsets shipped by 2009.
Though many mobile network operators would like to control the OS in handsets, handset manufacturers still largely govern the market for handset operating systems. In the longer term, the problem with both carrier optimized OSes and proprietary OSes is less functionality. ABI Research says users will ultimately drive demand for smartphones because of better functionality for such things as larger screen size, improved menu navigation and a broad platform on which you can more easily add applications to enhance the user experiences. These capabilities are all limited under carrier-specific or proprietary OSs.
Among the critical success factors for Symbian to date has been the reluctance of carriers and handset vendors alike to utilize Microsoft's Windows Mobile for fear that Microsoft would come to dominate the mobile device OS market as it did the PC OS market, driving differentiation largely to the OS and away from handset hardware.
However, ABI Research also asks the question of whether handset vendors will begin viewing Symbian OS as a threat due to Nokia's apparent interest in gaining control over the platform? Given the relationship between Nokia and Symbian, ABI Research said it is 'no surprise' that Motorola, Nokia's largest competitor, has chosen to pull out of Symbian OS as a shareholder, and also posed the question of whether the process of choosing a standardized OS will prove to be just a case of choosing 'which devil to dance with'.
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