Tim Bajarin writes: "Look at the mobile operating systems available today: Apple's OS X, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Nokia's Symbian, Qualcomm's Brew, RIM's BlackBerry, Palm's current OS and its future Linux OS and Limo. As a software developer, which do you back—since in most cases, it's impossible to support all of them? If history repeats itself, perhaps only two or three will really thrive. By the way, while 275 to 300 million PCs are being sold each year, annual sales of cell phones amount to about 1.2 billion, and many researchers believe that the worldwide market for smartphones or mobile PCs will represent as much as 70 percent of the cell phones sold annually by 2013.
If I were a betting man, I'd wager that Apple's platform will be one of the major ones. And given its incredible lead in this area now, Apple will force its competitors to follow its lead in hardware and software designs just to stay competitive. I also believe that Nokia's sheer market strength will make Symbian another major OS. And Microsoft already has a strong position with the Windows Mobile platform; I'd be surprised if the company doesn't optimize this OS for a broader world market for smartphones."
