The teaser commercial for the new Motorola Droid smartphone, set for release on Friday, is clear: Verizon hopes it has an iPhone-killer on its hands. With black text on a white background, a la every iPhone commercial, the Droid ad attacks everything the iPhone lacks.
Media coverage of the new smartphone largely has focused on its chances of competing with Apple's immensely popular device. Along with Droid's inclusion of a QWERTY keyboard, the biggest difference between it and the iPhone is the operating system: Google-backed Android. It'll be Verizon's first Android phone and the first smartphone on the market with Android 2.0.
Rarely mentioned, however, is another player in the mobile OS market – Microsoft. Why not? Because not many people in the smartphone world seem to really give a hoot about Windows Mobile anymore.
"It was gaining fractions" of market share, said Azita Arvani, a mobile-industry analyst and the founder of Los Angeles-based Arvani Group. "Then it just seemed like Microsoft dropped the ball a couple years ago."
Even after the October release of Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft's mobile operating system seems antiquated because it's still mostly text-based, Arvani said. Apple's iPhone OS and Google Android, for example, are much more visual.
Maybe Microsoft got distracted by the problems it had with Windows Vista. Maybe it just lost sight of the future smartphone market.
But in any case, Microsoft's Windows Mobile team needs to turn things around, Arvani said. And soon.
"They need to have a different mindset and change their thinking completely," she said. "The world has changed. It's no longer about downloading operating systems and downloading applications, and sitting and going on the Internet occasionally."
Microsoft's main advantage is the potential for integration between Windows on the desktop and Windows Mobile. But as the world shifts more and more toward cloud computing, such integration will become less important. Microsoft should take advantage of that opportunity as soon as possible, or it will be left in the dust.
Keep in mind that Microsoft, with Windows, does have the market's biggest developer base. If Microsoft can make it easier for developers to work with Windows Mobile, they could have a huge advantage – even though Apple already has more than 100,000 applications in its iPhone/iPod Touch App Store.
"But other than that, they don't have much to stand on," Arvani said of Microsoft.
here are about 20,000 apps available for Windows Mobile, with 450 of them available at Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile as of Oct. 21, the company said.
With the release of the Droid, Microsoft may have missed its last chance. Android 2.0 is an open-source operating system, meaning anybody with the know-how can create and market an app for it. And soon Android 2.0 will be on more smartphones.
The first version of Android, of course, also was open-source – and the operating system may prove to be a sleeping giant. Research firm Gartner has predicted Android will make up 14.5 percent of the market by 2012, ahead of Apple's mobile OS but second to Symbian.
Meanwhile, Windows Mobile's market share plummeted 33 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2009, according to analysis firm Canalys. The OS now has about 8.8 percent of the market.
Microsoft is expected to release Windows Mobile 7 sometime during 2010. But the company is staying mum about the product – except for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's comments that he wished WinMo7 were already released.
He also said that the company has pumped new people into the Windows Mobile team and that mistakes "will not happen again."
"I think (Microsoft) might still have a shot at it, but time is of the essence here," Arvani said. "There's no wow-factor. Everything they have, other phones can do."
Do you think Windows Mobile has a shot at rebounding?
Posted by Nick Eaton at November 4, 2009 9:00 p.m
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