This article, originally written for Orange, suggests that it’s not technology that makes a great mobile phone, it’s usability…
The secret mobile phone battle
Over the past two years, we’ve seen some dramatic changes in the ‘physical’ design of mobile handsets. But while manufacturers have added more memory, GPS, higher-res cameras and touch-sensitive displays, one element that’s often overlooked is usability.
Now that Apple’s iPhone has given the mobile market a kick up the backside, the battle is on to create the best mobile ‘user interface’.
At the high-end, it’s all about making mobiles smarter, evolving them from mere phones to internet connected handheld computers. It’s going to be a lucrative market.
As consumers, we typically upgrade our phones every 12 to 18 months when our contracts expire. Various factions want a piece of the pie – Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Symbian, RIM’s Blackberry OS, Apple’s iPhone, the Google-backed Android OS and the Linux Mobile (LiMo) foundation.
So who’s winning the smartphone battle?
While Apple is the current media darling and Microsoft continues to trumpet its corporate friendliness, it’s actually Symbian that boasts the largest global market share – 60%.
You might not recognise the name, but versions of the software power over 200 million phones made by Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. In comparison, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and RIM’s Blackberry have only an 11% share, the iPhone a mere 5%.
The enormous popularity of Symbian is the main reason why Nokia paid out £209 million for the complete rights to the OS. It then surprisingly announced that it was making the software available to developers for free.
New open source platforms
Why Nokia didn’t just keep Symbian to itself? On the one hand, the new, non-profit Symbian Foundation is a bold attempt to combat the growth of Windows Mobile – sooner or later Microsoft will get its mobile software right.
On the other, Nokia is levelling the field against the Google-backed Android mobile platform, which is also open source.
The appeal of an open-source platform is that applications can be freely written for it without having to pay a license fee. A common set of developer tool also encourages innovation.
Imagine what can be achieved on the next wave of mobile phones when absolutely anybody can design an application for them. Things are about to get interesting.
