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Predicting The Future: Android, Symbian Foundation, Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry

By: Daniel Chubb | June 26, 2008 | 8 Comments

Future of Cell Phones

Predicting the future of any industry in this technology world can be very hard and man has certainly not learned how to see the future just yet, well from what we know. On our post about the Google Android OS vs. Symbian open source and the much talked about Android vs. iPhone 3G, we had a very interesting point raised.

Harikrishna Neerkaje questioned how we could think that Apple was not one of the biggest players in the future of the cell phone business. They raised some very good points. Saying, “Without a doubt Nokia will be a key competitor but so will RIM & Apple (at least as far as Smartphones are concerned). In fact there are quite a few other players who build excellent smartphones on the Windows Mobile platform who too will be key competitors.

The only thing certain is that Android is not a “Today’s” platform and predicting the future is something man has not yet learnt”.

These were the six main points raised by Harikrishna Neerkaje – First the most popular smart phone today by volume of sales is RIM Blackberry. Second the fastest growing smart phone today by volume of sales in the last 2 quarters is Apple iPhone. Third the largest Cell Phone Manufacturer by volume of sales (not just Smart phones) is Nokia. Fourth the largest Mobile Phone OS by volume of sales is MS Windows Mobile. Fifth is on the Symbian Foundation, as yet only an announcement. It will take time to operationalize, but does have an OS which is already on many smartphones. Sixth and last is about Android and The Open Handset Alliance, with no phone in the market as yet and none expected till end of Q4 2008 in the US. So as yet they are not a competitor to anyone and there is no “data” that indicates that they will be a serious competitor in this space at any time.

Harikrishna Neerkaje ended by saying, how does this make Android and Symbian the biggest players, what’s your view?

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  • Karl M

    “…there is no “data” that indicates that they will be a serious competitor in this space at any time.”

    Of course and ‘search’ has no business model… there is lots of data out there that indicates that Android will be BIG. You only have to be able to read it… ;)

    Btw Symbian is worldwide not only the largest cell phones manufacturer but also the largest smartphone manufacturer. Perhaps you should realize that the US is not the only market to sell cell phones…

    No recent numbers but basically you can get the idea…

    http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/smartphonemarketshare.gif

  • http://GOOGLE jagadeesh kumar

    I WANT KNOW MORE ABOUT THE RIM BLACK BERRY PHONE

  • http://www.paniccode.com Oscar B

    I agree with Karl M.
    The world most sold mobile operating system and smartphones are Symbian devices, not Windows Mobile or RIM Blackberries.

  • alfiejr

    well, there is just one thing we can say for sure at this point: the entry into the smartphone market by two new leading-technology players – Apple and Google – has totally shaken everything up dramatically.

    Apple for the first time unleashed the full power of a modern computer – OSX – inside a cellphone (sorry, Windows Mobile was never in the same class, and the potential it did have was never used), featuring a much more sophisticated UI. Apple also engaged the cellphone with its complete supporting cross-platform media ecosystem – iTunes/iPod – another first.

    Google now hopes to be the first to introduce fully realized “cloud computing” into the cellphone with Android. how well that will work out we don’t know yet.

    now all the old-line cell/smartphone makers are racing to catch up: Nokia, RIM, HTC, Sony, LG et al. plus Microsoft. but Apple isn’t standing still …

    so Predictions are really iffy right now. my best guesses are:

    Apple will continue to lead the technology, always about 1 year ahead of the pack. it’s market share will grow and be good, but capped in the US due to the AT&T exclusive. worldwide, i just dunno.

    MS will try to catch up with Windows Mobile 7 in 2009, but never quite will technically. and it stands to be hurt most by Android, since both will be available to all makers and phone companies.

    Nokia in particular is hurt by the lack of a full-fledged supporting in-house media ecosystem, despite its millions of handsets and dozens of models, because it has let the phone companies do that up to now. Symbian Foundation isn’t going to fix that. maybe it needs to gobble up RealPlayer or another media service like it to get into the game fast.

    Sony will just never catch on no matter how good their hardware is – the Walkman is history and their UI is always clunky. Palm will die next year, sold cheap to ..? RIM will maintain its core of button-punching ‘crackberry’ addicts but never grow beyond that niche.

  • http://mart.ozmac.com Martin Hill

    Karl M,
    Here is a more recent version of that Canalys graph published on the developer.symbian.com site that more accurately reflects the growing marketshare of the iPhone (notice the purple section in the N. AM market):

    http://www.roughlydrafted.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/pasted-graphic-1-1.jpg

    http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/14/canalys-symbian-apple-iphone-already-leads-windows-mobile-in-us-market-share-q3-2007/

    Symbian used to very publicly present this Canalys data to prove its worldwide dominance. They have stopped doing so since the iPhone started making such rapid progress in the market. It will be very interesting to see this data post-iPhone 3G launch.

    -Mart

  • Karl M

    @Martin Hill,

    I expect it to be two good quarters for the iPhone in the US market and then a backslash will start. Back to reality, back to the 80s Mac experience.
    For the rest of the world I don’t see Apple getting a foot on the ground, they didn’t get it until now in Europe and they won’t get it now… But there is no reason for Nokia to be happy you are right, they will only publish these numbers if they look good, so they won’t publish them anymore ;)

  • william

    Jagadessh: If you want know more blue berry phone, try google search it.

    As for Android, it really sounds awesome but nobody will really know how the market will react to it until it is actually on the market. It’s quite possible that the carriers will manage to screw it up. It’s also possible that the demand just won’t be there. So many iPod and iPhone “killers” have come and gone that should be market leaders based on the specs, so we just can’t know, can we?

    Personally, I think the android phones are the very biggest threat that Apple faces. I don’t think they will be iPhone killers but I think they will do very, very well. But, they might not. The Apple iTunes App store is going to be very simple to use, and simple to use has kept the iTunes music store in business despite cheaper no-DRM competition.

  • Michael

    I agree most with alfiejr. I see apple as being so innovative that most people will continue to see iphones as novelties instead of functionality-oriented devices, thus apple will have a hard time breaking into the lucrative business phone market dominated by windows mobile and blackberry. Android has a much better chance of becoming very mainstream partially because it caters to both technology addicts and people who just want something that runs smoothly, which is very appealing to makers such as nokia, which so far hasn’t been keen to revolutionary devices. Because Android is an open-source platform, it gains strength with each new user. Android’s biggest threat is symbian, partly due to its global base and huge resources. I expect to see symbian attempt to raid the US market with something (I have no idea what) around mid to late 2009. Its success depends mostly on
    a) how much ground android has gained
    and
    b) how much mainstream smart phone users are fed up with windows mobile.
    With regards to windows mobile, it appears very slow and bulky, but has vast potential that can easily be reached if only microsoft would stop basing it so much on windows for pc and start approaching it as a completely different animal altogether, one that can actually revolutionize the way people do things. For example, there is a new app for android that lets users take pictures of barcodes of items in stores and gives the location of stores near to you with cheaper prices on the item. This type of feature will likely be expected of any serious phone within several years, and if Windows mobile cannot keep up the pace with this kind of thing, it will bite the dust.
    My prediction: Next year more phones will be released for android, people will be amazed with its capabilities, people will start gobbling up android phones, apple will manage the same thing but with more style very soon after, Windows Mobile will attempt it, but get to it way too late, and something will happen to it similar to the current debasement of internet explorer. Lots of carriers will vie for the next model that carries android, meanwhile symbian, which has proven itself globally, will quietly make deals with phone makers and carriers that are skeptical of android. Then symbian gets introduced on a massive scale possibly as late as 2010, and I have no idea what happens next. As for hardware, I see a full QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen becoming standard for most new smartphones, and apple will break tradition to fill this role. I don’t see any radical changes in terms of a shift of power away from nokia and motorola, but I could be wrong.