This issues backstop looks at the infighting going on at the moment that's attempting to define the Smartphone arena while (in some cases) not actually doing anything productive for it.
Since the falling out of Sendo and Microsoft there have been various other niggling things. Sendo are now taking Orange to court over patent infringements in the SPV. Palm and Handspring are combining. The first watch PDA is being released. And the mobile phone doesn't just make calls anymore.
Various players are currently marking out their patch in the smartphone world, Symbian have the biggest patch at the moment with the major phone manufaturers licensing their OS. Microsoft are marking their teritory with hot air, and using an odd tactic of using the network operators to make a device by farming out the production to companies that already make PocketPCs. Palm are not seeming so much to be pushing the smartphone market, but more keeping their PDA market ticking over while other manufacturers see fit to combine Palm PDAs with mobile phones. Linux mobile phone cum PDAs are also hitting the market and although may not be hugely popular to start with should pick up in sales.
It seems the people making the most noise about the smartphone revolution are Microsoft. It also seems that the people making the least headway into the market are Microsoft. Microsoft are repeatedly telling us how good their Smartphone OS is, yet phone manufacturers seem to be crawling over each other to avoid it. Whether this is a follow on from how Sendo got burned or a look to what happened previously in the PC market is anyone's guess, but according to Microsoft they have the best software, just no-one wants it.
On the flipside most mobile manufacturers have looked at or are releasing a Symbian based smartphone, or PDA phone. Linux is mostly taken on by Asian companies and Palm's effort is pioneered by Handspring adding phone capablilities to one of it's PDAs.
You could assume that the Smartphone industry is a 2 horse race, Microsoft vs Symbian, US vs UK, although personally I wouldn't rule out the others yet. Although for the time being Symbian build up a marked dominance while Microsoft talk the talk. Looking to the future, the idea of wrist based communication devices has seemed a bit StarTrek until recent years, but now the size of modern phone techology could allow just this, the last week has seen a Palm based wrist PDA be released in the US and although it's primitive by modern standards of the PDA, it's not hugely more limited than a smartphone, so in a few years we may see a combining of these technologies. Linux is hugely modifiable and cheap as chips to base an implementation on, and as the Sharp Zaurus proves it's possible to create a very well featured PDA with, as well as the smartphones circulating in Japan.
Dispite the current state of play, there's plenty of running left to do and the race is far from over. Most companies have staked their claim, and with wildcards like Sendo keeping a very careful watch on their IP, and the opposition the race could be set to become more interesting.
Posted by Switchblade at June 13, 2003 02:59 PM