Mobile trends - 2011

It’s been almost 3 years since my Boss came to me and told" Looks like mobile technologies is going to be huge. There is going to be a mass development efforts starting to happen on mobile. Let’s start having a look at it". That's when I started to read up and do some hands on mobile technologies, starting with J2ME and Windows Mobile. iPhone and Android were not the rage that they are now (at least Android was not). That's about the time when I wrote this blog. Now when I revisit that old blog, I'm really surprised at the change that has happened in the Mobile world. Mobile phones have given way to smart phones and they are now giving way for Super phones and Tablets.

While smart phones were about being a good media gadget (a good camera, a nice display with good audio and video capability) with a speedy processor along with 3G capability and a good browser and some fun to have apps, Super phones are all about being the media gadget with outrageous capabilities with a brilliant camera and brilliant displays, super fast processors (multi-cores), with 4G capability, great browsers and some serious apps. Almost all of the future phones announced by different phone companies almost all of them has plans to incorporate NFC technology in them. While Symbian was the uncrowned king 3 years back, the crown has moved to Android (in terms of market share at least...And I'm pretty sure iPhone owners will just smirk at market share).

Today mobile phones have become an integral part of our daily lives, more so than before. Let’s have a look at the current status of all the platforms mentioned in the earlier post and see where they stand.


iPhone (iOS)



Apple revolutionized the mobile world with its release of iPhone. They again did wonders with the concept of App store which became a raging success. Even though the iPod market was getting saturated, they virtually created a new market for tablets by releasing iPad. They brought out the Retina Display. Whatever the competition do as latest is already done by Apple. iOS has become the standard that other platforms are vying to become. Every product now wants a presence in the App store. But all this success was not without its share of problems. Apple is seen as closed and authoritarian system where they decide what apps to get approved or not. Their standoff with Adobe by not allowing Flash in iOS was major news. They had the infamous antenna-gate incident which took a lot of sheen from the release of iPhone 4 along with the search of Gizmodo heads house created a lot of negative publicity. Also they recently lost their superiority in the US market to Android. But by creating a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 and there by having it run on Verizon network could be a major change. All the folks that were running to Android because of AT&T will now have a choice to get iPhone from Verizon. The next version of iPhone is rumored to be coming with NFC capability and lots of other feature that the mobile enthusiasts are looking forward to.

Android



From being a small initiative from Google (via Open Handset Alliance) to the market leader, it has been quite a journey for Android. The growth for Android is just explosive. They grew from a 0 to more than 30% in just 3 years. In fact there was recent Canalys report where it said that Android has overtaken Symbian as the smart phone market leader in the last quarter of 2010. In these 3 years Android went through 5 new versions, each version bettering the product and bringing in more market share.(They also managed to give some interesting names for each versions, each being named after some dessert). Android is coming out in full swing with their latest version Android 3.0 (HoneyComb) which is said to made to target tablets. Tablets is the next arena where Android will have to fight it out with iOS and with the amount of new tablet releases announced for Android, it is going to be another interesting battle. Unlike iOS, Android is an open sourced platform and each handset makers have made different offerings (in terms of UI) to differentiate themselves from the competitors. This has augured well for Android (But this has also raised the fragmentation concerns amongst the developers too). The Android market is growing strong, catching up to the iTunes app store. One of the major negative feedback about Android market was about its usability and Google has heard those concerns and rectified it and come out with a new web version of the Android market.

Symbian



How the mighty have fallen. From being a Company that had more than 50% share of the smart phone market to just 30% (and eroding further) this is a big fall. While iOS and Android are in the next bout to retain the supremacy in the tablet segment, Symbian is still trying to be relevant in the mobile platforms. Symbian had gone through the cycle of being bought by Nokia, who open sourced it and later on pulled it back after some of the key members of the foundation like Samsung and Sony Ericsson has left it. And going by the response to the latest Nokia mobiles built on Symbian^3, it looks like it's about to reach its end of life. While everyone lauded Nokia N8 hardware, it was a unanimous review that the software (especially the UI) let it down. Rumor is that Nokia is shelving their plans to bring the next version of Symbian (Symbian^4) and put all their efforts in MeeGo (created by merging Moblin and Maemo. There were some other rumors that they might build phones based on Android or Windows Phone 7 OS (especially now that Stephen Elop is the new CEO, who was the head of the Microsoft Business division). But Nokia has denied these rumors. It looks like Nokia is betting on MeeGo for their future.

Windows Phone 7



Microsoft understood that carrying along dead weight won't do much help and no amount of beautification on the existing mobile will sell the Windows Mobile. So they stopped with Windows Mobile 6.5 went back to labs and came out with a brand new platform OS in Windows Phone 7. They clearly had put some thought and effort into it and the new Tile UI was unanimously appreciated. Even though starting afresh meant building apps from the scratch, Microsoft has always provided one of the best development environments in the form of Visual studio. In the new platform the UI is build using Silverlight and you can use the all familiar C# as you language. Windows Phone 7 started off with rave reviews and a plethora of devices from partners like HTC, Samsung, LG and Dell. They also made a good start with the Microsoft marketplace with a good number of apps to support. But even after this nice move from Microsoft, they are still not able make any dent in the market share. Microsoft has also made a nice move in the form of porting Windows 8 (an OS especially being made to target tablets) to run on ARM processors. But Apple has already had a great head start in the tablet division with its iPad and Android is now coming in there with their Honeycomb and it could be another case where Microsoft is a bit too late. But knowing Microsoft, you should never count them out; it might be a matter of time.

Blackberry



RIM is another company that has kind of lost a lot of its appeal. The 'crackberry' addicts are now moving away towards the iPhones and Droids. The enterprise world where Blackberry had a stronghold with its mail infrastructure is now waving. With Blackberry too the problem was about not innovating in the OS and the App store. While iPhone and Android built a fantastic environment with plenty of apps Blackberry was slow to move. The touch screen mobiles in the form of Storm were major embarrassment. The media capabilities were bad and the browser was one of the worst. Recently they tried to rectify these issues with releasing Blackberry OS 6 with a brand new webkit browser and better media capabilities. They also showcased a new tablet (Playbook) which has got some decent attention. RIM is still a major player in the mobile market but they are in a position from where they could go further down if they stop being innovative.

WebOS



Palm was becoming irrelevant in the mobile market after the rise of the iPhones and Androids. The first thing they did was to get Jon Rubinstein from Apple. Rubinstein was one of the brains behind the development of iPod. Then they did something similar to what Microsoft did. Then went back to the labs and started from the scratch and came out with webOS. webOS was reviewed positively by technology enthusiast across the world. Their deck of cards concept of UI was an entirely different offering compared to the competitors. Palm Pre and Palm Pixi were the two flagship devices for WebOS. Unfortunately for Palm webOS really didn't really hit it off even after all those hoopla's. One of the main reasons was the unavailability of apps in the palm web store as compared to the iPhone or Android offerings. Also the limitation in the number of devices could have been an issue. It looked like Palm was about to shut shop when HP bought the company over. Recently there have been announcements from HP about several new tablets coming to market running on webOS. This could mean a fresh new lease for webOS. But the choice on apps is something that HP will have to work to really push webOS to the top league.

Here is a graph showing the current market share of each OS



There are a few other platforms out there in the market like Brew from Qualcomm and Bada OS from Samsung which are trying to get into the main stream. It will be fun to see what’s going to happen in the mobile market in the future and what will be the status of each of these platforms.