The State of the Mobile OS Market

Wireless Week has a lengthy feature article on the mobile OS market that looks at efforts of the main players, Symbian, Microsoft and PalmSource, as well as the growing interest in Linux.

In assessing the various players, Todd Kort at Gartner stated that in the short-term the market looked good for Symbian and its Version 9 OS. Kort said, "The intention with OS 9 is to enable $100 hardware instead of the $500 hardware smartphones that are typical today. So the obvious conclusion is once they roll that out and you start seeing a lot of $100 smartphones, their market share is likely to increase."

According to Gartner, it expected Microsoft to maintain its 45-percent PDA market share and 10-percent smartphone share. "I don't think they've quite done enough – it is still running on more expensive hardware," Kort remarked.

Kort thought PalmSource's near-term future was less certain until it could produce a Linux-based OS, and he expected a Microsoft-based Treo model by the end of the year. "The Palm OS share of the PDA market and the smartphone market will continue to decline going forward,. Once PalmSource gets their product – the Palm layer on top of Linux – we're going to consider that a Linux OS rather than a Palm OS," he remarked.

Regarding Linux, Kort said, "That's the one that could turn around and go south, or if they get more vendor support – who knows?"