Symbian for Software Leaders: Principles of Successful Smartphone Development Projects

Chapter 4. Twenty reasons why smartphones will win

Two kinds of battle

Press and analysts sometimes write about a battle between vendors of smartphone operating systems – a supposed titanic struggle between Symbian and several other reasonably well-known software companies. This makes for dramatic reading. You've almost certainly seen articles on that theme. However, these articles generally overlook an even greater drama – a battle with much greater significance than that between the smartphone operating systems. This is the battle between two categories of phones – between smartphones and feature phones. It's a battle that involves decisions made by hundreds of millions of end-users: will they choose to purchase and use a smartphone, or will they choose to stick with a feature phone? The net outcome of all these decisions determines whether the smartphone market grows over the next few years to hundreds of millions of phones sold annually, or whether it remains an order of magnitude smaller. It's of little interest to me that Symbian's share in the smartphone market is far ahead of any competitor in this space, if the space itself remains small.

Feature phones are one level of sophistication down from smart-phones. Feature phones have, well, lots of features, but the primary functionality set of a feature phone is fixed in advance – which is why feature phones are sometimes also called "closed phones". In contrast, for any given smartphone, the functionality is much more open-ended ...