Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Update 2007-03-17: MEX has elaborated on the Canalys report in Growth in open OS will shift zones of influence. In my opinion the industry over-exaggerates the proliferation and current user benefits of phones with Open OSes, as most such phones are still mainly used for voice and text messaging. The trend towards using Open OSes more is clear though, but the costs are also clear, and both Symbian OS and Windows Mobile are considered expensive. Symbian and Microsoft need to change their pricing policy as we overall move to more inexpensive and mainstream smartphones.

Mobile carriers sick of so many operating systems talks about Symbian OS and Windows Mobile being the dominant OSes on smartphones, implying that very soon most phones will run any of these OSes, while the fact of the matter is that the transition will take several years, as the cost of using smartphone OSes are considerably higher than for the dominant solution based on a lightweight OS kernel with often a manufacturer-developed application platform and in-sourced applications, as well as Java ME or BREW. Clearly the shift is going on, but the note indicates it's going fast, which it's not, as the market for low- to mid-range phones is still booming in emerging markets. Also most phones sold in the developed markets are based on this architecture. Sales of Symbian OS based phones are increasing fast, but from a low level.

More relevant would be to talk application platforms, as that's what developers of applications need to face. There Java ME is still completely dominating. As I've mentioned before, official figures from Sun and Nokia indicate there are 1.5B phones with Java ME (the CLDC/MIDP variant mostly) and 100M with Symbian OS (mainly Nokia's Series 60). In that sense even Flash Lite is more dominating than Symbian OS as an application platform, as Adobe claims 200M phones run it (on top of the actual OS). Also, almost all smartphones also run Java ME.

Quote: 'But smart phones, high-end devices that have access to the Internet and send e-mail,'
Even the simplest phones have Internet access and e-mail today.

Smartphones sold last year (according to Canalys):

• Symbian OS (Series 60 or UIQ): 66% ("2/3")
• Microsoft (Windows Mobile etc): 14%
• RIM: 7%
• Linux: 6%

Note that BlackBerrys can also run standard MIDlets. Note also that Linux phones can make use a number of different UIs, so it's not possible to talk about one consistent Linux-based mobile application platform (hence all the industry efforts to try to standardize Mobile Linux). Of course neither can be said about Java ME to be honest, but volume-wise the difference is staggering. Some Linux phones are also closed from an application developer's point-of-view, which of course makes matters worse.

It should be noted that I have one big concern about Java ME CLDC/MIDP, and that is that the UI is so terrible. Most developers still use only Canvas UI, as using the highlevel UI is too limiting and simply not viable for games. Even developers of more serious applications often stay away from the high-level UI. This will increasingly be a drawback for MIDlet development, when moving outside games, and even there. Don't expect Java ME CDC to take over though. MIDP 3.0 has considerable UI improvements (including full customization), but will it be enough to retain the current dominance of CLDC/MIDP? There are also concerns about incompatibilities between phones and limited access to newer phone functionality (due to slow standardization), so the Java ME "model" is certainly not bullet-proof in any way, looking at the longer term, but it will still dominate for years to come.

I found another note on the convergence topic: Platform proliferation limiting mobile content?