Who will rule the mobile market in 5 years?
From one of the discussions titled very similar, came this (in our opinion) very insightful comment by Alex Pakka
BlackBerry will have a major chunk of the corporate market for a while. The simple fact is, no one can come close to the infrastructure and this level of relationship with each individual carrier that fast. No matter how much money one has. BlackBerry is more than just a device, it is middle tier + device + push/security/IT policies etc. It might not hold up to the latest and greatest consumer devices in flashiness, but as a corporate workhorse it will stay for the foreseeable future. No other smart phone can deliver intranet access from around the globe as effectively and securely. I would bet on RIM still holding 40% of the corporate smart phone market in North America in 5 years. Most probably RIM will also have strategic partnerships in the infrastructure/middle tier areas with IBM, Oracle and SAP.
iPhone will come up with new ultra cool devices for mac-oriented people (of which we will see more). I would not dismiss Apple’s innovative edge just yet and consumers will like it a lot. At least 30% of consumer smart phone market will be firmly in Apple’s hands.
Android will target the middle ground between biz and consumers, maybe prosumers are the target. I don’t see any possibility for Androids to escape fragmenting into loosely coupled eco-systems, around large manufacturers. The capabilities and proprietary OS extensions will be so different, that many software vendors will give up on a single piece running everywhere (which will be feasible with RIM and Apple). But Android should be the most flexible one for fancy things involving clouds, LBS and social networks.
Nokia will go with maemo, but I guess it will split the market with Android by delivering more robust, but heavier devices. And Android will do with flashy lighter ones (offloading things to the cloud too). Symbian will propbably stay, but not in the smart phone market. At least not in the the high-end. All others seem to be marginalized.
Software will shift to widgets and HTML 5.0 for sure. But the process is going to be fairly slow – in 5 years it will be an achievement of the industry if half of the mobile software is widget-style.
We agree with this almost entirely and think this is a great summary of what might happen in the future. 5 years is a long time in technology and is even more so in the rapid moving mobile technology, so many surprises are possible in the future and no one, we believe can predict now what will happen close enough.