[Ilugc] About Blackberry and M$
- From: siva.ilugc@xxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Mon Jul 3 23:39:49 2006
On 7/3/06, Toufeeq Hussain <toufeeqh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
OTOH,
The HP iPaq's (and the PocketPC line) have been hugely succesful in
the smartphone area. The Dell Axim x51 is a very good PDA if you have
multimedia needs. Palm OS based Palm LifeDrive is a huge failure.
Windows Mobile has overwhelming market share in PDAs, but not in
Smartphones. The thing to note is that PDAs are a shrinking market, and
cellphones are substituting them.
as it stands I see Windows Mobile in the
forefront of PDA/smartphone technology.
PDAs maybe; Smartphones, no. They're almost completely out of the
picture in Smartphones, except for the Treo 700w.
Maemo looks promising but the reviews of the Nokia 770 have not been
great. There seem to be no future commitments from Nokia on it though.
Yes, according to a Nokia insider whom I met, Maemo was a learning
experiment which they're not going to follow up on.
There is going to be a huge gap in the embedded OS space as Symbian
fails to meet requirements, and the way I see it, M$ seems to have
cornered all the players in the field to have a bite of the Windows
Mobile pie.
Symbian will not go away - the Nokia Series 60 UI runs on Symbian and
some 1 billion people around the world are so familiar with it that it
cannot be easily substituted. However, a Series 60 port to Linux is
certainly possible, in which case Symbian will whither away and die.
Windows Mobile will survive in the PDA space, but that's a small
volume niche. There isn't enough revenue in this space to support the
number of companies that are out there - some will have to pull the
plug, including HP and Dell. Only low-end Chinese manufacturers
like HTC and Vtech will survive. That's not the kind of revenue model
that M$ is looking for.
-Siva
P.S. The early Linux handhelds failed commercially, but those were
mainly PDAs. In phones, both the NTT Docomo i-mode units running
Linux as well as Motorola's Java units have sold huge numbers. The
platform standardization news that I posted is huge news, not least
because both Motorola and Docomo are involved.
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