What flavor is your smartphone OS?

The App Store difference
The ease with which the phone can be customized, with personal software programs from Apple’s App Store, also is a “powerful” component, Greengart said, and one that is being added by others.

Android has the fledgling Android Market; RIM is planning an application “storefront” in the spring, and Palm and Microsoft have similar efforts underway.

Windows Mobile
You’ll find Windows Mobile on a variety of phones from many different vendors including HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola and even Palm, which has offered its Treo models with either the Palm OS or Windows Mobile OS. Samsung’s popular BlackJack and Motorola’s Q smartphones use Windows Mobile.

“Microsoft has been all about taking the PC experience into a mobile phone, and to some extent, they were somewhat successful,” said Burden. “Most people don’t look at a Windows Mobile phone as terribly intuitive. But what Microsoft has done is develop an OS for devices that seems to have resonated with business users.”

Windows Mobile “basically mimics a little computer with a little start menu,” said Greengart. “It’s highly logically organized, so it’s very easy to get around. The learning curve is fairly minimal for anyone who’s ever used a Windows PC, but at the same time it’s not that exciting.”

To make it more so, especially on touchscreen phones, companies like Samsung and HTC have added overlays, or “skins,” to Windows Mobile that make it more user-friendly for touch applications.

Windows Mobile 6.1 has some improvements over 6.0, including a better home screen, and is more stable in terms of fewer crashes or freezes, Greengart.

“The big question is what kind of update Microsoft will do with it in 2009,” he said. “In the past they have shown versions of Windows Mobile that are much more consumer friendly.”

Palm A new Palm operating system may be announced next month.

Palm
The Palm operating system’s icon-based home screen was around long before Apple did the same with the iPhone.

“One of Palm’s best qualities is its simplicity and its personal information management applications,” said Greengart. “The Palm OS is still the easiest operating system to add a calendar appointment to.”

But Palm's operating system has been losing market share, mainly to RIM and Apple. The Palm OS is about to get a major re-do called “Nova.”

It’s not known whether Nova, based on Linux, will be able to put Palm back on the smartphone map.

Nova “seems to be Palm’s last-ditch efforts in this space,” said Burden. “We don’t know what it will look like. I suspect it will be a platform that is not only for mobile phones, but for Internet devices and netbooks,” smaller laptops that focus on Web browsing and e-mail.

Android
Backed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance, there’s only one phone right now that uses Android, the T-Mobile G1. But in the months ahead, there are going to be others coming to market that rely on Android, an open-source operating system based on Linux.

An update to the operating system called “cupcake,” due out next year, will improve e-mail, Web browsing and phone functionality, as well as a host of fixes to the operating system.

At this point, Android is very much viewed as “the Google phone.” In order to use the G1, for example, you have to have a Gmail e-mail account.

“If you live online with Google, you use Gmail, Google Maps, Calendar and do a lot of Google searches, you’re really going to like Android because all those things are built into the OS from the outset,” said Greengart.

If you want to get your Outlook work e-mail, though, there are no programs yet for Android that will let you do so.

Linux
Mobile Linux has multiple flavors, as is appropriate for an open-source operating system. You won’t necessarily see Linux mentioned as a phone’s operating system. Motorola, for example, sells a lot of mobile Linux phones.

“They don’t give you any way to add applications to them, or to synchronize with a PC, either,” said Greengart. “The consumer smartphone experience, which usually includes mobile e-mail and some sort of PC synchronization, is absent from these devices.”

Symbian
Symbian, like Linux, isn’t necessarily marketed as part of a phone; it’s very much an under-the-hood operating system, purring away without too much bother.

“The reason why it was so successful in the early days of smartphones is because Nokia was putting it into mobile phones and de-emphasizing that these phones had operating systems in them,” said Burden of ABI Research.

“People buying these phones just thought they were buying a better camera phone, or whatever, and not realizing they were necessarily buying a smartphone. That says a lot about the simplicity of that operating system.”

Symbian’s popularity “stems in large part from some exceptional products made by Nokia,” Greengart said. There are other companies that have licensed Symbian, including Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, “but Nokia ships the lion’s share of Symbian smartphones,” he said.

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