14 DAY TRIAL // The latest prediction on how the smartphone market will evolve in the next years has revealed that Microsoft hopes for 20 million devices to run on Windows Mobile 6 by the year 2008. A Berg Insight report currently sees this mobile operating system dropping down to only six percent of the total.
Moreover, the Berg report comes with an optimistic perspective on the future of Windows Mobile's competitors. Symbian is expected to be the leader of the smartphone market in 2012, whereas Linux has high chances of running on a 41 percent share from the total of these devices.
Moreover, Linux-based stacks, such as Access Linux Platform are most highly expected to be sold at an even larger rate. This results from the fact that "A majority of the key handset vendors already sell Linux devices in some markets".
The predictions are based on observing the current tendency of the smartphone market. Such devices have reached the number of more than 80 million by the end of year 2006. They are capable of more complex operations and offer advanced functions, but the main consequence for this is a considerable increase in the power consumption level.
This is the point where Linux proves to be highly more efficient for mobile phone use. Although it has a considerable platform fragmentation, it proves to be much more stable and less resource consuming.
When comparing this report with previous ones, we see that they are considerably different. IDC predicted towards the end of last year that Windows Mobile had high chances and more than 30 percent of the entire mobile phone market by the year 2010. Going back with one more year, another report said that Windows Mobile would come close to 30 percent of the market, followed up close by Linux and then Symbian. It seems that as time passes, Windows Mobile loses everybody's confidence regarding its success.