A few years from now, AT&T will be using only one operating system for all of their smart phones. The question will be: which one? Symbian? Windows Mobile? Palm? Android? Blackberry? Apple?
As of now, it’s Symbian.
“The mobile operator believes smartphones will make up the largest portion of devices connecting to its network by about 2014, and it wants to avoid the fragmentation of platforms that has made it hard to develop mobile applications,” said Roger Smith, director of next generation services, data product realization at AT&T in an article posted on Yahoo! Tech. “Speaking at the Symbian Partner Event in San Francisco, he said Symbian is ‘a very credible and likely candidate’ to become that one operating system.”
It makes sense that AT&T picks Symbian. It’s an open source operating system, lower license fees that AT&T pays than if the provider went with Microsoft or Blackberry. Plus, there isn’t a lot of third party software available for phone; which allows AT&T to lock down the phone to developers.
But what about Apple? Apple gives AT&T the iPhone and Apple does support for the phone, AT&T just sells it and allows the phone to work on their network.
Does this have merit? I doubt it as Windows Mobile and Blackberry is dominating the smartphone market, even though Windows Mobile is losing ground to Apple.