A smartphone is a mobile phone offering advanced capabilities, but what does this mean for mobile phone industry and end-users?

Is your phone smart enough? if you buy it in the last 3 days so the answer will depend of how much you paid for it.

We will try to analyse and define some key points or criterias that make a mobile phone smart enough to be called SMARTPHONE.

• Minimum requirements to be on top list of SmartPhones:
  • Email client (with Exchange support)
  • Agenda (with Exchange support)
  • A big screen
  • High Speed connection
  • Good Internet Browser
  • Wi-Fi
  • GPS
  • Gaming capabilities (motion sensor, 3D/OpenGL, ...)
  • High Resolution Camera
  • High Definition Videao capabilities
  • Applications store
  • Big Storage (8Gb is a minimum)
  • A slot to extend memory is a +
  • Flash support is a +
  • Multi-Touch is a + (yes a + as if you look at multi-touch feature usage you'll realise that it's not as popular as you think, for example, in your mobile internet browser it's easier to zoom using double tap than 2 fingers)

If your phone doesn't have all above features in it then your probably in the 75% of peoples who does not own a SmartPhone which is not necessary a bad thing as it probably mean your doesn't rule your life ;)

Today (We will say, March 2010) there are several mobile phone OSs, some well known by the public (like iPhone OS, BlackBerry) and some that stay behind the curtains (like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, Bada, Maemo, Meego, PalmOS...), we will try to make a quick tour of Mobile OSs and I'll try to give you fist an objective point of view then my personal feeling (Warning: you need to be Schizophrenic to do that exercise)

What are the most popular OSs?

• Symbian: Owned by Nokia and we will say made for Nokia as other manufacturers tend to get out from it, according to several research companies, Symbian has caught almost half of Smartphone's market share
  • Author Personal Comment: As there is no industry standard definition of a smartphone I would like to highlight that almost ALL Nokia phones are considered as Smartphones which is not true because some of them offer features that were advanced enough few years ago but if we consider today's standards for me about half of Nokia phones (that are counted by the analysts as smartphone) should be considered as featured-phones or mid-tiers phones.
  • Rumor: As Symbian became Open-Source, Nokia will now mainly put its effort on new MeeGo platform (merge of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin platforms)
• RIM Blackberry: Owned by RIM (Research In Motion), it's a proprietary OS that is more entreprise oriented and is fitting to most of companies by providing them security and professional features (Emails/Agenda/Internet Browsing/etc...), the market share of this mobile OS is still good enough in term of business but it has some lacks of innovation.
  • Author Personal Comment: One of the strenght of Blackberry is its Brand, from 90th to 2005 for many peoples the BlackBerry was considered as a "winner" phone (Business man/ Entrepreneur/ High Position Jobs/...), few years ago it was like owning a Rolex or a BMW Z4, today, today it is suffering of all efforts made by other platforms (mainly Windows Mobile & iPhone) to please the enterprise world, RIM has been neglected and turns into and old looking OS (as an girl/boy that nobody wants to marry anymore).
  • Rumor: Microsoft is looking at RIM acquisition...
• iPhone: Its an Apple Proprietary OS, for now there are 3 models (Yes I said 3 models) of mobile phones running this OS, the iPhone, the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3Gs and these 3 models have propulsed Apple to the 3rd place in few years, this was a big shock for the industry and a bigger one for analysts and marketers, for the 1st time the "Hype" was mixed with innovation, they also brings the 1st application store (not the way we use to know it)
  • Author Personal Comment: When I said "innovation" I'm talking about user interface and workflow, from technical and hardware point of view, for me Apple is still below the line (Compared to a Nokia smartphone or some other smartphones running Windows Mobile or Android), the iPhone still has some limitations (from a geek point of view) but it 200% responds to most of end-users needs, I would also say that in term of loyalty the Brand is taking all the benefits of previous products they made (I bet that if the iPhone was made by someone else than Apple it wouldn't have a such huge success)
  • Rumor: Hard to get a rumor from Apple ;) but I'm quite sure that they will announce a new iPhone model soon (3G super mega S? lol)
• Windows Mobile: This name sounds familiar? hmmm, just guess who is it? Yes! Microsoft. For me it's one of the most popular cross-manufacturer OS with a significant list of adopters like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, HTC,  and many others, it is the name of formerly Windows CE (let say an extra light Windows OS especially made for smartphones)
  • Author Personal Comment: These last 2 years Windows Mobile felt into the 4th position and was the big competition looser, current version is 6.5 and for now Microsoft failed to brings back all manufacturers to it's mobile OS. Hey Microsoft, one last card in hands => Windows Mobile 7, if they could make it with the same gap as between Vista and 7 I'm sure they will success, otherwise, bye bye Windows... other thing is that Windows has its own application store now but not as popular as Apple app store or Android Market.
  • Rumor: Windows 7 is not a rumor anymore and was showed during the Mobile World Congres 2010 in Barcelona and first device is planned to be released this fall.
• Android: What a strange name... This platform was introduced about 2 years ago by Google and it is developped in colaboration with OHA (Open Handset Alliance) members, this OS is open (technically), open source and FREE, the 3rd criteria was maybe the reason for its success in mobile world industry
  • Author Personal Comment: Now a manufacturer or an operator do not need to spend millions in research and development and could focus on bringing better extra-services like communities, data plans, speed, etc... to the end users, the other reason for Android adoption is that apps programmation language is the well known JAVA (ok, well known by those who develop software...), for me its the real challenger for Microsoft as it is cross-manufacturer (exactly the same targets as Windows Mobile) and its Android market is becoming more and more popular
  • Rumor: 1st Full Flash (10.1) support phone will be an Android phone... coming soon
• Others:
  • PalmOS, a WebOS that is still searching for its public
  • Bada, an OS from Samsung, was this created just for Fun? Is it "cool" to have its own OS? or is to not be Symbian, Android or Windows Mobile dependant? Who knows
  • Many other Linux etc... not popular enough yet.