So I was looking around for a smartphone.
I think the time has come when there are about 5 main OS's in the market : Symbian, RIM, Apple, Android and Windows. (and perhaps the Palm OS). Symbian runs on the Nokia phones, RIM runs on the Blackberries, Apple OS on the iPhone, Android on a few phones like the G1, Samsung Moment, the Droid etc. Windows Mobile runs on some HTC phones.
The way I see it, there are a lot of Blackberries around and a lot of iPhones too. In many eastern countries, Nokia is king.
According to this these will continue to be the important ones in 2012. This is not hard to see since each seems to have a good user base. Question is which will increase in the next few years.
If we look at the history of computing, Windows came out on top of Apple not because it was the first, nor because it was really good, but because it was cheaper and because there were more people writing apps for it.
Apple is a late entry (Windows, Symbian and RIM) have been in the market a long time. However, Apple, and then Android stressed on Apps. User / developer generated apps. This is critical, since only users have the creativity to come up with apps that solve their everyday problems. Developers employed by the company, while surely the best people to develop apps, simply dont have the time or the ideas to come up with new things every day.
So in the end, who is going to win depends on who can get the most Apps. Bizarrely, to write apps for iPhone, you need to BUY the SDK at $100! This, to me, is strange since if I was going to give it away for free, I should be able to get the SDK for free. However, the Windows PC OS platform was similarly built, but people still contributed just because they loved to code.
Apple OS, of course, has got a head start. Apple recently announced that there are now 100,000 apps for the iPhone, thought apparently only a handful are actually being used by anyone. Android is way behind with only 10,000 apps. The only possible way that Android can catch up is if every one of those developers take their app and port it to Android (which is not a bad idea).
Of the many S/W products that we use daily, many are free. All of Google is free, as are parts of Windows. Office is still not free and never will be, however a significant portion of the world wants to use Google docs or Open Office. The only problem is still the old problem of compatibility. Firefox is free and has slowly taken over market share from IE. There are other examples. The point I am trying to make is that in the Web 2.0 world, free seems to work. And this might mean Android has a good chance, because it is free.
Whether the prediction given in the link above will come out true, in 2012, only time will tell. I am putting my money on Android, simply because I trust Google to do the right thing. They seem to have the Midas touch, so it would seem like a good bet.
