But as far as the OEM support for promoting products is concerd they are not still up to the mark. They are wasting there energy by promoting WMA and WMP and some propriety technologies which will back fire them since overnight its difficult to make people switch to those formats. The inablity to provide hardware acclaration support in DShow technologies is a major bottleneck. Symbian is good in those things. But in giving development tools and other things there are not up to the time making the “time to market” process lengthier. Innovation i think Nokia and Microsoft are good contenders.

When it comes to “Smartphone” Symbian had snatched the “Ease of use” from Microsoft. From a user point of view Microsoft is still in the babyhood. Microsoft should know playing the cards at right time or else they may loose the game.

I believe we cannot predict about the success failure of a particular platform as of now.Be down to earth and realistic, It will be only a forecast and may be a guess !

HTC, Palm, Motorola, Samsung, HP, Dell, Wistron, ASUS, Acer, Symbol, Garmin, Flextronics, Mitac, Sagem, Unitech, HHP (Handheld Products), Intermec, Itronix…that’s 18 of them; there are quite a few more. Don’t forget that Windows Mobile is on ‘classic’ PDA devices as well as phones…but more and more of these makers are doing phones, even in the industrial products.

Next week, I am doing a roadshow in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi comparing the Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms.

http://www.microsoft.com/india/msdn/events/

What is strange is that history repeats itself. Once again, Symbian which is (was ?) a clear market leader is throwing away the advantage by not constantly innovating and building a super productive development platform.

Developers, Developers, Developers….

Tarun Anand http://tarunanand.typepad.com

Nokia’s licensing of some Exchange technologies allows it to be a me-too player. However, tell me ANY company that has successfully competed against Microsoft using its own technology.

The writing has been on the wall for years, and Nokia should have become an active player in the strategic directions of the back-end email server + strategies to displace Outlook.

Only hope now is to work with guys such as Scalix and/or Zimbra that need significant injections of capital to build a global sales and marketing presence to ho head-to-head against Microsoft with their Exchange replacements.

Also have a look around for something called the Peabody platform (which is mentioned in that press release).

The devices are definately maturing, but there may be a few more iterations of device generations before mass market adoption.

However, as the price of high-end feature phones comes down to a mass market pricepoint, say around $50-$99, which it will in the next two years, then phones like Cingular’s 2125 will likely grow in popularity. And once there’s a decent-sized base, say 30-50 million installed, Windows Mobile will certainly get more developer support than it does.

That said, Symbian is sure to make a play for this market as well. As will Linux, etc. It should make for some interesting competition. The fact that MSFT is even competing this far along, is what many people assumed would never happen.

voice SMS WAP XHTML lite Java (Me + enhancements)

I’m afraid windows Mobile isnt even on the radar yet, which is why I’m interested in the possibility of Microsoft reaching a tipping point in the U.S. (I’m only familiar with Europe and emerging markets) I kind of assumed U.S. was similar but haven’t yet seen evidence. I would like to know however if it is so as it is important to us for obvious reasons ;)