Like competition? Suck it up and buy a Windows Phone.

I have yet to take the plunge into Smartphoneland. In my pocket you’ll find a Verizon-branded LG Cosmos (as in, the first one). I speak about smartphone industry as an outsider. It gives me a perspective that adopters of that technology have lost. I see an exciting industry that only truly cracked open about four years ago with the original iPhone. Since then we've seen carriers and OEMs consolidate, litigate and imitate one another with some exciting results. One of these is a potential future where I will have only two choices for my smartphone operating system: iOS or Android.



Why those two? Current market trends within the United States make it pretty plain. In late July, Nielsen released some rather telling market figures. The free-wheeling, chaotic Android platform in its various permutations is now the dominant smartphone platform in the land, with most of its new growth coming from first time buyers. There are dozens of hardware skews across every major carrier in the United States, and the labyrinthine branding scheme forces the huddled, feature phone-branding masses to navigate the differences between proprietary overlays, the Droid branding of Motorola, Nexus devices produced by different manufacturers year over year, and occasionally waiting for OS updates that will never come. On the other side of the tracks is the gated community offered to us by Cupertino: vertically controlled devices with slick, predictable operating systems. The chaos and confusion in the Android environment is mitigated, largely by taking away a lot of the freedoms inherent that silly little Linux-esque world. Both approaches are valid, and there are fine devices baring either OS (considering Apple devices as far back as the 3GS are receiving iOS 5).

Above: The American smartphone market, late 2011.

Unfortunately, the success of these platforms has been a disruptive force within the smartphone industry. Android and iOS have climbed over other potential products to get where they are, and some of them were ground into dust in the process. Who are these losers? The first great casualty was probably Nokia’s Symbian. The relative “smart-ness” of that platform was certainly up for debate, but Symbian predates both Android and iOS and had incredible market penetration outside of the United States. That platform is all but extinct stateside. Seeing as the stillborn MeeGo will never be coming to our shores, it is effectively dead here. It will live on in Europe and developing markets, but no us carriers are offering it. The other smoldering husk on the battlefield would be WebOS; after Palm’s acquisition by Hewlett-Packard and the worst board of directors ever assembled by human beings, that mobile division was tied to a device that the company decided to abandon after six weeks. WebOS Stores are now extinct, and the developers of the platform have been cast to the four corners of the earth. Until earlier today, the company was even mulling spinning off its PC business under the enlightened guidance of new CEO Meg Whitman. The whole mess was so unfortunate that no less that Steve Jobs was dismayed by it.


That’s three platforms effectively out of the race in America. What’s left? What’s left is a terminally ill relative from Waterloo and an Aspie who never moved out of his mom’s basement in Redmond. I’ve made my opinions on RIM’s state of affairs clear in our first podcast (shameless plug!), and I’m hardly the only person convinced that someday soon we will wake up to a world where BlackBerry phones are listed along side the dodo bird and the Bull Moose Party as extinct. Efforts to make BlackBerry devices desirable to the consumer market have arguably been a waste of Research in Motion’s war chest, especially considering they could have spent that fliff on updating their proprietary email servers to prevent the most catastrophic outage since the PSN fiasco earlier this year. I’ll posit that, had the Canucks stuck with pushing for innovations on the enterprise side of things, they would be as resilient as they always had been. The ballyhoo-ed consumerization of IT would be shrugged of by enterprise because the improving security scene on Android and iOS would still pale in comparison the the secure, scalable, reliable BlackBerry environment that has the approval of the American government (including the goddamn PlayBook, for cripes sake).


Oh, and the PlayBook was a half-baked device that will flush even more money down the toilet for RIM. You know, lest we forget. Salt in an open wound? Tough. Consumers don’t deserve to be sold devices that aren’t up to snuff, and the notion that RIM is relying on porting Android apps to the platform as a selling point is pathetic. It’s an admission that QNX will probably never have the adoption of Android, and isn’t worth native development efforts. That’s prior to the platform’s release on an actual phone, and they’ve thrown in the towel. Unbelievable.


Nothing I’ve said here is new or impressive. Hell, LG’s mobile division director Scott Ahn described this scenario almost two years ago. The socially awkward penguin left standing in the room is Windows Mobile, bedecked its latest fruit-flavored incarnation. It is the last hope we have, assuming we like having a third option.


NokiaWorld has come and gone, and it is now clear that We, the People won’t be seeing either of these Lumia devices this year. That leaves us with precisely six phones across the four major carriers, and two of them - Verizon and Sprint - have token offerings from HTC. T-Moble appears kind enough to provide us with the well-reviewed HTC Titan in the near future, but past that it looks like the holiday season’s smartphone sales will be dominated by the iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy II S, and the HTC Rhyme (you know, for girls); nobody is going to try to sell you a Windows Phone 7 device. Nokia could have gotten a head start in America if it had brought these devices across the Atlantic by New Years, particularly the sexy ass Lumia 800, but it did not do so. This will work to the company’s advantage, and perhaps to the platform’s advantage as well. Nokia does better historically elsewhere amongst the six billion other people shopping for phones. If Windows Phone 7 can secure a reasonable portion of the global market share by living in those gorgeous, unibody shells, the platform will survive and will inevitably be available to us, whether on Nokia’s devices or somebody else.


The truth of the matter is, Microsoft is a big dumb company. When a project or device doesn’t do outstanding immediately, it will continue to support it until it captures the hearts and minds of the world with some killer app (think Halo on the orginal Xbox), or until it goes into denial and we get some sort of stupid, Schrödinger's cat scenario (think the recent Zune HD discontinuation announcement). Microsoft will throw money at Windows Phone 7 whether or not it sells. Hell, the argument could be made that it hasn’t sold yet. We’ll be seeing Windows handsets for a while, because Microsoft is resolved to see them made. It can soak up any losses incurred from profits on each Android device sold, or this thing called Windows 7.


If you’re going to bet on a dark horse, you might as well bet on the one that has a good chance of being kept alive like some kind of biotic, nightmare creature. Better that than a BlackBerry zombie waiting for a headshot. The ultimate irony of this situation is that consumers might be pushed to Redmond as a third option against a potential duopoly situation, as if it were some sort of plucky underdog. What do you think? Am I on crazy pills?