SMART OPERATING SYSTEMS – A RELENTLESS WAR FOR DOMINANCE

For the past five years we’ve been witnessing a relentless turf battle to dominate the smartphone operating system market. One can easily infer the factors of this battle and point to a very large market with considerable growth as the key driver behind this “gloves off” battle. For example:

• The global smartphone category (~240M unit forecasted for 2010) is growing at around 45% YoY, due mostly to innovation, large subsidies from operators, and lower cost phones running on some of the new OS
• Assuming a $250 average price per device, this will be a $60Bn market globally in 2010.
• Smartphones will account for about 20% of all phones shipped globally, and is by far the fastest growing category

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While today, Symbian holds a clear lead with about 44% of the global smartphone market (see left hand side of chart), there is massive flux in the America’s market as the Android OS adds more OEMs and gains popularity (see right hand side of chart).

 
FLEXIBILITY AND CHOICE – THE KEY WORDS FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS AND ETAILERS/RETAILERS

Because there are still a lot of battles to be fought before the winner of the SOS can be easily declared, it’s important that service providers and eTailers/retailers remain flexible in the way that they go to market and enable their consumers with choice. As such enabling their customers at the point of sale with tools that can transfer their content from one phone to another, independent of operating systems becomes critical for them to capitalize on this changing landscape.

Check out the following flash demo to see how our customers are leveraging the ConvergenceNow® Plus+ platform to not only activate and provision devices for consumers but also transferring and synchronizing content across mobile devices and networks.