14 DAY TRIAL // South Korean mobile phone maker LG Electronics stated recently that it aimed at delivering to the market during the ongoing year handsets powered by Google's Android platform, or by Microsoft's newly unveiled Windows Phone 7 OS. Unlike Samsung, the handset vendor does not aim at launching its own operating system, it seems.
“Our strategy is not to make an independent mobile platform of our own at least for the next two to three years,” Skott Ahn, the head of LG's handset unit, stated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. The company already released phones powered by Android and Windows Mobile, and it seems that it remains focused on these mobile platforms.
According to Ahn, the competition on the smartphone market area is expected to drive the number of existing operating systems to only three in the following few years. “It is a competition of how to make an ecosystem that combines device, platform, contents and service. It is difficult for a single company to dominate the entire ecosystem,” he said, according to FierceWireless.
Even so, the leading handset vendor does plan to focus a lot on the smartphone segment during the ongoing year, it seems, this being the reason for which it revealed plans to come out with devices powered by Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS. One thing that should be mentioned here is that the handsets powered by Microsoft's mobile client are expected to be more expensive that Android phones with similar hardware specifications.
“I think there's something clean and simple and easy to understand about our model. We build something, we sell that thing ... I think it's not only in our best interests, but it's a simple model that's easy for developers, handset manufacturers, and our operator partners to deal with, to understand, and to build from,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at MWC. This means that the manufacturing costs will be coupled with licensing costs, resulting in higher price tags for the handsets, though the difference should be only a small one.