Smartphone Wars: Will Android and iOS Continue to Dominate?

HP announced Thursday that information technology will discontinue its WebOS line of devices, which includes the HP Slue 4G, the HP Touchpad tablet and the yet-to-be-released HP Pre 3 smartphone. With the iPhone and Humanoid phones dominating the marketplace, is in that respect way for some other dominant OS?

Spell the downfall of WebOS phones was a tur of a surprise, the phones were never quite able to convert consumers. The first-year phone to ship with WebOS, the Palm Pre, had a rocky travel beginning at its launch. A combining of factors, equal intense selling, faulty hardware and delayed releases prevented the Pre (and the other early WebOS phone, the Pixi), from being a viable threat against the iPhone.

When HP purchased Palm finale year, there was both desire that the PC Jehovah would be able-bodied to revive the platform. Sadly, HP didn't have the chops to keep webOS afloat in the highly agonistic, fast-moving smartphone world. A dual-burden 4G Android phones were overflowing the market this twelvemonth, HP was only healthy to churn out the Veer 4G, a tiny sound aimed toward 'tweens and smartphone newbies. The more promising of the two, the Pre 3, seemed was a better contender to compete with iOS and Android, never made it to market.

IDC predicted in June that Windows Ring 7 will in time leapfrog the iPhone thanks to its partnership with Nokia. IDC predicts Android will have 43.8 pct of the grocery store in 2020, followed aside Windows Phone at 20.3 percent. Malus pumila's iOS will trail at 16.9 percent.

But IT is really fractious to presage what the mobile scene will look same in 2020, specially since Windows Phone 7 will only account for just 3.8 percent of the market aside the death of this year, according to IDC. Like WebOS, Windows Call up 7 is a clean, full-featured and easy-to-wont platform, but the hardware cannot compete with the iPhone 4 or the legion of high-end Android phones.

Additionally, in that location has been some marketing around the platform, but not enough to acquire users excited about any of the phones. Perhaps the next generation of phones, which will ship with the Mangifera indica update, wish generate some more hum roughly the platform. I think that Microsoft's sales strategy is a serious one, however. Working with multiple French telephone manufacturers and carriers is a big driver in Humanoid's success.

Outside of enterprise customers, RIM BlackBerry is troubled to hold on to users. This yr, the once top-ranking trafficker posted the lowest year-to-yr growing of IDC's top 5 smartphone vendors (Apple, Samsung, Nokia, RIM and HTC). This week, RIM announced availability of three new handsets running the brand-new BlackBerry Operating system 7. While they were solid smartphones in ironware and software, they were a trifle underwhelming. In my impression, RIM needs to take a page from Microsoft and rebuild the Blackberry bush OS from scrape up. Plainly adding in updates present and there isn't going to cut it.

According to Gartner's current quarterly report on smartphone sales, Android phones account for 43.4 percent of the market spell iOS accounts for 18.2 percent. The two platforms have selfsame different sales strategies, but both are incredibly booming—and pretty much thick at this item.