I finally caught up with responding to my emails that piled over the past two weeks while I was away attending the GSMA Mobile World Congress.  Overall, the conference was fulfilling as always and there was quite the turn out considering that most parts of the world is still recovering from the financial crisis in 2008-2009.

There were two major announcements that caught my attention last week.  The first was the unveiling Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 operating system, and the second was Samsung's new Bada Smartphone operating system.

The Windows Phone 7 OS was developed from scratch and is a total rewrite of Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS.  Windows Phone 7 OS looked very refreshing with a totally new home screen and user interface. There is better integration to social networking applications.  Additionally, there seem to be more focus placed around integration to other Microsoft products such as the Xbox LIVE and Zune products.  However, phones bearing the Windows Phone 7 OS will not be available until later this year, just in time for the holiday season.  I think there is still a lot of testing and bug fixes to be cycled since the phone crashed a couple of times during it's demonstration.  At the time, there were no mention of any development tools or SDKs that are available for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Samsung's new Bada Smartphone platform is available on the new Samsung Wave mobile device.  Unlike Microsoft, Samsung is also launching a the new Bada developer community along with Bada application market place.  Samsung hopes for rapid adoption from the developer community because bada applications can leverage a C++ application framework.  One vendor that I spoke to at the event is already working on porting as many of their PS3 games over to the Bada platform.

With all of the mobile OS and application stores being introduced between last year and this year,  it will be interesting to see which platforms will have the most rapid adoption and whether the success of Apple's appStore can be replicated.  I think the market is still maturing and there is still ample opportunity for companies like Samsung, RIM, Google and Nokia to carve out a significant market share.  Especially when you take out the North American smartphone market and look at Europe, Asia and South America where the the smartphone market share is predominantly saturated by Samsung, Nokia and LG devices.   

Posted on: Saturday, February 27, 2010