MobileMonday Global

Mobile Operating Systems: Where is the Technology Going?

At the next event, on the 1st December at "Marriot Park Hotel" in Rome, we'll talk about Mobile Operating Systems. The event will be the evening before the opening of Broadband Business Forum 2008 (Registration to BBF 2008 is free!)

Even while new mobile operating systems continue to hit the market, experts speaking during the CTIA conference in San Francisco have anticipated a consolidation of the software.

"There will be a sharp contraction in the number of platforms," said Christy Wyatt, vice president of software platforms and ecosystem for Motorola, speaking at a round-table event about open-source software in mobile. "We won't get to one, but maybe there will be one consistent version of Linux."

For now, the LiMo Foundation and Google with Androids are separately working on incompatible Linux-based operating systems. Symbian recently announced that it is in the process of open sourcing its operating system.

Even if the open-source platforms merge into one, it will join many other mobile operating systems including Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Apple's Mac OS that runs the iPhone, as well as many other proprietary operating systems running mid- to low-end phones. Which operating systems win might probabily be decided by mobile operators, not end-users. Some operators, such as Vodafone in Europe, have said that they intend to only sell phones running two or three operating systems.

The increasing number of mobile operating systems is putting a strain on the pool of application developers interested in building products for mobile devices, but Motorola's Wyatt agrees that the overall size of the mobile market makes it worth it for developers to port their applications across platforms.

Despite the gloomy economic picture and the problems being experienced by some of the leading mobile handset vendors, global shipments of smart phones hit a new peak of just under 40 million units in Q3 2008. This means smart phones now represent around 13% of the total mobile phone market, up from 11% last quarter.

The introduction of the iPhone 3G in July and Apple’s expansion into many more countries helped propel the vendor to second place globally, taking it above RIM in the quarter and resulting in higher shipments than for all the Microsoft-based smart phones combined.

Looking at the Q3 smart phone market by operating system, things have got particularly interesting with the decline in shipments of Symbian devices by the key Japanese vendors, and each of the top five hardware vendors largely allied to a different OS. With competition in the smart phone space heating up, being able to introduce technology and user interface enhancements quickly is critical. You also need to be able to integrate them seamlessly into the device to provide a great total user experience. And that means having sufficient control of development of the operating system, which Apple and RIM clearly have already. Nokia’s acquisition of Symbian should help it in this regard, regardless of what other Symbian Foundation members choose to do.

Motorola, currently holding onto fourth place in smart phones thanks largely to its Linux-based models, recently announced it would move away from using the Symbian OS and focus more on Android. With T-Mobile’s G1 now shipping in the US and the UK, Android will appear in the Q4 smart phone numbers, but more vendors and a wider range of device designs will be needed to achieve significant global shipment levels. While they will appeal to some, particularly professional users, research suggests that devices with large, slide-out keyboards just don’t resonate as well in the consumer market as pure touch screen designs.

Many industry experts believe that the most important constituent for any mobile operating system are:

from User perspective:

* Delivering superior end user functionality and “experience”

* Capability to provide for evolving usage demands• Adaptable to reflect end user personality

from Administrator perspective:

* Activate, administrate, support, upgrade and secure the device while remote

* Fit within overall IT environment

from Developer perspective:

* Consistency of platform

* Ability to select own tools and techniques

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

The VMware MVP is software that can be embedded on a mobile phone to provide the platform for running a virtualized mobile OS and its accompanying applications. VMware claims that this software would run efficiently even on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained phones.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper- proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president, at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized", she says.

Mobile Monday attendance is free and the event is open to all interested people - all you need to do is to ensure your place by registering to the event (see the top right corner of this website)!

We thank Broadband Business Forum and Wireless for its support as sponsor of the event!