What is the operating system for wireless mobile devices? It
is what a mobile is built on with more advanced capability connectivity than a
feature phone. How important is it? Based
on my understanding, it is mostly
like the brain to the body. the
body cannot function without the brain. Or it is like the foundation to the house.
The apps are like the variety of the houses. Without a good operating system,
all fancy apps are useless. Now you can see how important it is!
The current mobile
operating systems for smartphone are Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, Nokia’s
Symbian, RIM’s BlackBerry OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone shown as in the
lecture PowerPoint (the data in 2011).
Surprisingly,
Android’s users are larger than iOS user. Android system was founded in October
2003, while the first multi-touch interface mobile phone, iPhone, was released
in 2007. As the demand for smartphone increases in the recent years, the rate
of lawsuits based on patents for smartphones increases greatly in 2010 as more
and more companies engaged in patent wars.
When we take a look
at the global smartphone operating system market share in Quarter 4, 2012.
We can see that both Android and iOS competed
in a promptly growing. According to BetaNews, the demand of Android and iOS
heavily rely on Apple and Samsung. I think it might be one of the most essential
reason why Apple consider Samsung as its biggest enemy in the smartphone market
and file a lot of patent lawsuits against Samsung. The question is whether
Apple can take back the market share if it can beat Samsung. I doubt it since
the chance for Apple to win is tiny, plus, other Android smartphone are still
there trying to gain share against Apple and Samsung. As professor Lavian questioned
in the PowerPoint :” Who is Number 3 Operating System?” I guess it’s really
hard to say. Success comes with risks. Although Android share continue increase
and iOS share decreases, it’s hard to predict the share after the smartphone
market saturates. Not to mention the improvement
of the comparability of other operating systems. Thus, I am more interested to
see who is No. 1 in a few year. Android again? Maybe. iOS? Maybe. Or something
else? You name it!
This is a very interesting question. Some unknown company right now may come up with a brilliant operating system and come out on top in a few years. It's difficult for iOS to beat Android right now, since Android is implemented in a large number of phones, where iOS is just for Apple hardware.
ReplyDeleteThere are actually a few new operating systems that could probably add to the tension/litigation between these companies. Blackberry just released a completely new version of their OS. In the last month, Ubuntu announced open-source versions of Ubuntu for mobile and tablets to be available soon. In addition, Mozilla is launching Firefox OS for low-end smartphones later this year. I'm sure it'll be interesting to see how all of these operating systems play out over the next few years.
ReplyDelete