ZDNet’s roundup of the smart phone battles is an excellent primer to the battle of the goliaths. For me, the most compelling part of the story comes when they handicap the field:

Apple: The 3G iPhone will move units because it has an enthusiastic customer base that will continue to buy the latest from Apple. That’s powerful. Meanwhile, international expansion and enterprise interest keeps Apple rolling.

RIM: RIM isn’t going anywhere and will maintain its share and strength. In the enterprise, RIM is entrenched. In the consumer market, RIM is pretty interesting. As far as buzz goes, look for RIM and Apple to be the leaders.

Nokia: Was the Symbian deal savvy or desperate? Time will tell, but there are a lot of financial types saying that Nokia shares are a value. Nokia is a big dog globally and has a nice mix of high-priced and low-priced devices. It sure would be nice if Nokia were more of a player in the U.S.

Palm: It’s a bit depressing when Palm’s big plan is a refreshed Treo line powered by Windows Mobile. There are a ton of devices powered by Windows Mobile. Where’s the differentiation? And that’s the problem. There is little to differentiate Palm’s devices–except for Centro’s price. That’s not a great model.

Sony Ericsson: This device maker moves a lot of units and has some Walkman mojo courtesy of Sony. However, the company will have an increasingly difficult time differentiating itself.

Samsung and LG: Both are big. Both can be trendy. And both can play the price game.

Motorola: No groundbreaking designs. Commodity handsets. Still decent market share. Even when Motorola spins off the handset division it’s questionable whether the unit can stand alone.

The big three : RIM, Apple and Nokia, aren’t exactly Microsoft centric organizations. Each have embedded operating systems that play better with the network than they do with the desktop, and if Microsoft’s failed online strategy was the first nail in the coffin, this would be the second. Anyone for nail number 3?

Next Monday, I’m really pleased and excited to be running the “Voice Mashup Business Models” panel and the “Service Delivery Platforms” panel at the Voice Peering Forum in San Francisco. The REASON I’m so excited is because the caliber of speakers we have is simply excellent. To prepare for the panel, I asked a number of the speakers spend a few minutes with me on the phone, and I recorded it for you to hear….

• Garry Galinski is the Director of Product Innovation for Call Genie. If you have fifteen minutes, you really need to take a listen to this podcast, because Call Genie is providing an excellent platform for deploying services for carriers that follow the “two sided market” ideas championed by the smart guys at Telco 2.0. If you are unfamiliar with two sided business models, or think that the only business model for telephony is termination, listen up. Just like I think that Backflip has really solved the go-to market problem for CEBP enablement software, I think Call Genie is spot-on with providing enhanced services to carriers.
• Pankaj Shroff is the Chief Applications Architect for Sonus Networks. You could view Sonus as the smallest of the major switch vendors, or the largest of the next generation vendors. Either way, when somebody high up talks, I’m focused in. In this interview, Pankaj hints about how the larger carriers view the battle of the future.
• Irv Shapiro is the CEO of Ifbyphone, a service provider targeted towards enabling voice mashups for SMB, mid-market and smaller workgroups in the Enterprise. In our conversation, Irv and I touch on a bunch of topics… listen for Irv’s understanding of what workgroups need successfully deploy voice mashups.
• Shai Berger is the founder of Fonolo, the quintessential Telco 2.0 service provider. If you are a company that provides an API and targets the consumer, I would study Shai and Fonolo… it is the best example I can come up with when people ask me what voice mashups look like for the consumer.
• Bill Binnig is the VP of Marketing from Jaduka, a service provider targeted a bit higher on the food chain, providing voice APIs for the Enterprise. In our conversation, Bill and I talk about people confuse VoIP and next generation voice applications, which might have nothing to do with VoIP.

Actually, it only feels that way. I downloaded Firefox 3 this morning onto my laptop, and so far, so good. I’m sure the bugs are there and all, but I really do feel like I’m running a new machine. And isn’t that telling? Enough of the applications I use on a daily basis are web based, so from my user viewpoint, my browser is my computer.

So for those of you who wonder if the desktop wars will be between Microsoft and open source, I say no. The desktop wars are between Firefox, Safari and Air.

I’ll take the other side of Phil Wolf’s criticism of iPhone’s push notification service. Phil says it sucks; I say it rocks.

To summarize and to be fair to Phil (as I like Phil very much, as a neat guy and a bright boy), his criticism centers around user interface, architecture and basic network philosophy. He points out that notifications kill foreground sessions, which can surely be user interface naughty. Agreed. He also points out that it breaks good network architecture by tying user’s hands as all notifications have to come through it. Agreed again, with a suggestion that just like the Sabbath being made for the man, not the other way around, good network architectures and principals are are good because they server people better.

Here’s why I think Phil is wrong here: push notifications bring insane value to the enterprise by enabling the business process. Arguing against it is like complaining to the doctor that you only use heart defibrillators with aluminum paddles, not steel, and could he please just find a better one. Push notifications are the heart of business process improvement for nearly every case I find, and it holds true for mobile workers, remote workers and consumers involved in the process. Remote notifications enable dissemination of data to the general public. Remote notifications provide decision support by delivering information to the right person at the right time. Remote notifications can kick off other applications to bring data back in from the field. It’s hard for me to imagine a more important feature and capability to communications enabled business process design, and I applaud Apple for figuring this out.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, as I know my telecom history well, but this might be another case where a more reliable and guaranteed service is more important than intellectual purity. It is this feature alone that will drive me as a CEBP developer to invest time and energy into the iPhone platform.

Found this post from telecomtv today about Google’s taking the wraps off of the Google Android operating system. Here’s what caught my eye:

Rubin also said that
the days of the “traditionally’ high cost of software development for
mobiles are numbered and believes that once Android hits the market the
costs of such developments will fall dramatically. He said, “We think
about 20 per cent of a mobile’s cost is software, and because Android
is free and open, that means close to zero cost on the software side.”



Andy Rubin also expects Android to be extensively customised, with
operators, developers and even end-users tinkering with the OS to
create a myriad of iterations and applications.



He said, “Android has come into existence as a direct result of the
freedom conferred by web development. It’s taking a lot of the concepts
that were formed on the Internet and bringing them to mobile, and the
chief architectural concept is the notion of mash-ups.”

Ok – I’m very cool with mashups (obviously), but as I read this, there’s more than one worry in my head…

Because 20 percent of a mobile’s cost is software, and because Android is free and open, that means close to zero cost on the software side.

Really? Where do I start with this one…

• Open source might be free to acquire, but is hardly free to integrate and support.
• So, you mean to say that the developers of the software aren’t going to get any money? Actually, considering how busted the mobile application business models seem to be, that’s probably not too far from the truth. The developers of the software won’t get any money.
• Ummm… so the majority of the problem, the cost of the HARDWARE, is unaffected here? Well, great. I guess.

Andy Rubin also expects Android to be extensively customised, with
operators, developers and even end-users tinkering with the OS to
create a myriad of iterations and applications.

Perhaps this is where all the money that we are saving from the software is going… to the support departments of the carriers that have to support the heavily customized, tinkered devices. Well, great. I guess.

He said, “Android has come into existence as a direct result of the
freedom conferred by web development. It’s taking a lot of the concepts
that were formed on the Internet and bringing them to mobile, and the
chief architectural concept is the notion of mash-ups.”

Well, OK. He’s got me there. Let’s just hope that somehow, brilliantly, all the carriers who deploy Android applications actually support web approaches.

As for me, here’s my bet. If the mobile market is like how the PC industry was back in 1984, then Google Android is the PC, and the iPhone is the Mac. Let’s see if it takes another twenty years before we learn the lessons this time.

Thanks to Simon Wardley for finding Earle who found this:

The Evolution of the Cell Phone