Authored By:Maheep Gupta
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road” said Stewart Brand. I think all Mobile OS developers (mostly OEMs) have learnt this lesson by heart and some of them in a pretty hard way. Before going into further details, some background on what exactly we are talking about will help – an Operating System is the software responsible for controlling the core hardware and acts as a bridge between users and the device itself. The device here can be a computer or mobile or any other equipment for that matter, even a music player or your set top box. So in terms of mobile OS, its essentially the software which controls your mobile phones and interpret your actions to the phone.
I remember when we were in college, I never actually heard of the term mobile phone, let alone smart phones. Now, we might have been a bunch of dumb small town kids but thanks to the changing times and most importantly internet, things are not like that anymore. Till 5 years back, the whole mobile phone market was not as cutting throat as we are seeing it now. There were very few companies for handset manufacturing and even less in the OS market. Phones at that time were sought after as a solution to stay in touch while you are in move and most of them had a simple Java based OS, which was designed to do what we say bare minimum. Symbian used to enjoy an overt leadership for the Smartphone market, thanks to its patron Nokia. For the elite ones there were Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones but I never recall them as the penchant for masses. No one considered the phones as a multipurpose device at that time and craze for the mobile phone applications and games was almost nonexistent. Things changed with the time and then there came Apple iPhone in 2007. Apple showed them what a mobile phone can actually do and how an optimized mobile OS can change the overall market and more over lifestyle of the users. Traditional players like Nokia and Motorola were almost stunned for some time and then suddenly there was a mad mad rush for a better operating system and do it all kind of mobile phones. As on now, Apple, Nokia, Google, Samsung, Intel, Microsoft etc. are all in this race. To name the major players in the game -
- Nokia - Maemo, Symbian
- Apple - iPhone OS
- Samsung - ‘Bada’
- Google - ‘Android’
- Palm Inc. - Palm web OS
- Microsoft - Windows Mobile
- Nokia and Intel joint - MeeGo
- RIM - Blackberry
While Palm, RIM, Microsoft and Symbian are the oldest players in the market but till few years back, they never bothered to study the changing market needs and it was like take it or leave it kind of situation for the consumers. However, sometimes, a nice hard kick is what it takes to wake up and that is what Apple did to them. They made a very clever use of touch screens and optimized the interface to offer a unique solution on Smartphone platforms. Thanks to them, now each of the companies and even some new players like Google are spending millions of dollars to make the whole system as friendly and usable as it can be. With the incessant increase in the form and number of operating systems, there is also an increase seen in the qualitative and quantitative efforts of these operating systems developers to allure the mobile handset developers. In order to meet these new circumstances, mobile OS developers are trying various new options to capture and recapture the market share.
To recover its losses and re-establish its strong foot-hold in the worldwide market, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Phone 7 Series of Windows Mobile at the Mobile World Congress 2010. For the first time ever, Microsoft will bring together Xbox LIVE games and the Zune music and video experience on a mobile phone, exclusively on Windows Phone 7 Series. Symbian is also planning to make the new versions available by the end of 2010. RIM has come up with touch screen based Storm series for their Blackberry phones. Intel and Nokia announced that the two companies will combine their Smartphone operating systems, with Nokia’s Linux based Maemo merging with Intel’s Moblin. Nokia and Intel both hope that new MeeGo Linux-based OS will help to compete with their rivals by providing the joint capabilities of both. As they say, consumer is the king and end of the day it’s the consumer who is going to be crowned here as well. That been said, in some respects, this is negatively affecting business houses, software developers and even consumers on some aspects.
Business houses - Employees in a company wants to have mobile of his choice and thus different OS. So, if every employee will have a different OS and mobile, the company will have to spend time and money developing a version of the software for every platform and mobile they are having. This doesn’t seem to be a viable option.
Application developers - With each new handset and OS standard, application developers have to face formidable development costs. A need arise for them to gather an in-house development team for each standard. This increases their economic and work burden.
Consumers - It is getting difficult for consumers to use software of their choice on their mobile operating system, because there cannot be a master of all solution. For example a certain mobile platform might be very good for business needs but not for the entertainment and so on. Thus they are often left compromising on one front or another. Consolidation of mobile operating systems is emerging as a potential solution to this problem. Many companies are building platforms that are designed to let developers write an application usable across the various mobile-phone platforms. To deal with the growing competition, more of such options are needed. Whatever options these vendors adopt, we are sure to benefit from it.
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riju
said:
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... very nice,and very informative.Thank you.Mobile has made the life mobile now-a-days.Keep it up.God bless |
Akhila Satchidanandam
said:
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... True that 10 years ago, we never would have dreamt that a mobile phone would become an essential aid... And the development of technology knows no bounds the way its going... Nice work Maheep.  |
Dick Fernelius
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... Hi,perfect post,thanks for your share! and I want to know if i can use this text in my website if I place a link back to yours? Waiting for your comment! |
Carroll Wadlinger
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... You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang of it! |
Bobbie Bodenhamer
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... Fine blog. I got a lot of great info. I've been keeping an eye on this technology for awhile. It's fascinating how it keeps shifting, yet some of the core components remain the same. |
