The Year Everything Changed?

Welcome to the SymbianOne round up of 2007 and preview of 2008. 2007 is a year that could go down as a significant turning point in the battle for mobile OS supremacy ... or so much of the mainstream press would have us believe.

So let's first look at these stories.

The Apple iPhone launched to a wave of hysterical fervor usually reserved for rock stars. Apple certainly managed to out PR everyone in the industry with the launch. The device has gone on to sell well and take a reported 25% share of the US market; second only to RIM. However, whether the iPhone proves to be seismic still awaits to be seen. Apple have been touted before and, while it has built a viable business, failed to take a significant market share globally. The iPhone is a constrained design much like the iPod, which until it got touch was little more than the same product repackaged to create demand. It will be in 2008 that iPhone shows what metal it has, as distribution goes global and iPhone 2 appears. SymbianOne's prediction is that, while the iPhone will sell well, it will ultimately be a marginal product.

The second big story was Google's Android. Highly anticipated as the gPhone, it turned out to be a Linux based featurephone platform, not a true smartphone competitor as the only development option is a rather non-standard version of Java. While subject to the same media hoopla as the iPhone, the challenges for Android are significant and ultimately these challenges come down to cost. Android is being positioned as a replacement for the many proprietary operating systems used by mobile phone manufacturers. The problem with displacing these operating systems is simple: manufacturers already have hundreds if not thousands of engineers who know the in house OS along with the systems for building phones on these OSs. Even if Android is free, the cost of retraining and retooling to make use of it may be prohibitive. Even for a green field implementation, there is a global lack of embedded Linux developers that will hamper rapid deployment. This has essentially been the issue facing most Linux initiatives. True, Google has the resources to push Android over the long term, but this may still not be enough. SymbianOne's prediction is that Android will struggle to make headway in 2008.

So while many mainstream technology pundits see the mobile landscape as having changed in 2007, the changes may ultimately prove to be less significant than they expect.

So what happen in 2007 that will have a big intact in 2008 - read on to see some of the top stories in the Symbian world and how they will affect 2008 ....

Read More at http://www.symbianone.com/monitor/monitor2007_22.html