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?

A massive shout-out to my man Dean at Cognation, who has taken up my recent challenge about the future success (or lack thereof) of Ooma. From his recent comment :

Ok Thomas I’m prepared to step up and take that bet from you, easy money in my books.

In 12 months from now I bet that Ooma will still be in business and am prepared to wager a dinner here in New York.

Reply post here to your blog to accept so we have this on public record.

It may be because of some of the consulting projects I’ve been involved with here at www.Cognation.net but I think Ooma have capture some very interesting aspects;

1/ Ease of use and design (so sorely lacking in a large number of basic projects I see) their ATA is ‘the’ best ata I’ve seen, nothing revolutionary but it’s just well designed plain and simple.
….and whats dissapointing about this fact is that with all the brains in the voip industry no one else came up with this design until now.

2/ Ease of uptake (keeping original number is such a barrier to entry to skypein and similar – yes I’m looking at you Grand Central).

3/ Ease of implementation in their business model (peer to peer using existing ethernet/internet infrastructure with zero billing – how easy is that).

Like I said easy money and I look forward to accepting your bet.

I’ll set up a page on the www.cognation.net website to track developments over the next 12 months.

Now, since they’ve raised a bazillion dollars, there’s no reason why they should EVER go out of business, so we’ll need a better measure than the doors closing. That aside, I’m up for this bet, partly because I think it will be fun, but partly because I love dinner in New York. I’m betting that ease of use, ease of implementation and ease of uptake will spiral into the ground because it’s simply not that valuable to the target customer. I say we pick a number of Ooma subscribers, and let’s see if they go over that number. I’m not going to suggest that Ooma get a five million subscriber number, like the iPhone – or even a moderate number, like a million, that Vonage had. Can anyone think of a good metric? Outside of dinner, it’s not that I’m hoping for Ooma’s demise. In fact, I’d be tickled pink for them to succeed. My breath? Not holding it. I’m just hoping, just like many others, that this is the last effort at a business model that seems to fail nearly every time it’s tried.

Well all know that the iPhone will mash, but will it blend?

Walter Mossberg has spoken – the iPhone is a break through. As I was telling my Judo club last night, you had to somebody like Walter to get your hands on one. Check out his completely thorough review.

At the end, he mentions that the iPhone isn’t a good choice for somebody who needs a simple phone, but for those that need high end features, it’s a beautiful device. I think there’s another user who would benefit : the corporate worker who doesn’t need a ruggedized platform. The large iPhone screen and the simple integration with Web 2.0 applications make it the perfect mobile computing platform for many low-impact, yet mobile, jobs.

Chopi, the Thomas Howe Company designer, caught this link today of an iPhone UI simulator. Steve Jobs has announced that the API for the iPhone will be Safari (after bashing the browser as an interface just a few weeks earlier). As I wrote about earlier in the Jaduka post this morning, you can do some pretty neat things with phone/web integration, but my suspicion will be that the choice of Safari will be initially limiting.

How limiting? Well, now you can know. The iPhone UI simulator will show you exactly what you can do with the iPhone, on your OS X laptop. Funtionality includes :

• Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
• Open any website that works with Safari.
• Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation
• Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
• Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.

So, how does it look? I checked out some Telephony 2.0 sites to see how they fared….

I had to share this with you from Paul Kedrosky:

Apple closed up 3.8% today, gaining $4-billion largely on word that its battery life will be about two hours longer than expected. Apparently an hour of battery life is worth $2-billion these days. That’s good to know.