Today, Nokia officially announced the long-since leaked Nokia N900 smartphone/internet tablet with Mamo as it’s OS. With that, the smartphone schene has gotten another contender. Let the smartphone wars begin.

The situation today

The N900 is basically the child of a N97 and an evolved version of the Linux distro Maemo, used on Nokias old Internet tablet such as the N800 I once had. It has a 3.5″ 800×480 touch screen, 5 mega pixel camera, slide down keyboard and some other neat tricks like 1GB of RAM and a 600MHz Arm CPU.

Nokias problem has always been software. Symbian S60, the OS of choice for every single Nokia smartphone in the last 10 years, is old. Very old, very outdated. It’s basically DOS compared to Windows 7 when you see it against the iPhone, Android, or any more recent OS. Windows Mobile is in the same boat, with it’s version 6.5 still being outdated compared to the competition. The reason for this is that cell phones have changed a lot in the last couple of years – better processors, bigger screens, and touchscreens all around. Both Symbian and Windows Mobile are old, and the core is built around cell phones with buttons. Touch screen controls are fundamentally different, and trying to patch the OS to fit such screens will always end in failure – as both the newer versions of Windows Mobile and S60 v5 has shown when you compare it to the newer, built-from-scratch OSes.

The contenders in the market today are starting to get plentiful: discounting the outdated S60 and Windows Mobile, you have the BlackBerry OS that the BlackBerries use, Palm’s WebOS found on the Palm Pre, Android found on several phones such as the recently released HTC Hero, iPhone OS (aka Mobile OS-X) found on the iPhone and today’s new addition Maemo which will most likely be Nokias main smartphone platform (at least for such devices, S60 might still be around for the E series).

Strengths and weaknesses

Each of these OSes have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are in the software itself, others in the infra structure of the respective companies.

Starting with the iPhone, a lot of people complain about it being locked down with Apple’s approval process for apps and lack of features such as multitasking. At the same time, the iPhone is the iPhone – it has the full backing of everyone who knows the importance of Apple branding. This means that for both accessories and software (two aspects which is somewhat intertwined after the 3.0 update) it has a lot more support in the Apple infrastructure than any other platform. Apple basically reinvented cell phone applications with the App store for the iPhone, and everyone else is trying to play catchup. The thing is that with Apple now having been in the game for several years, they are way ahead of the other companies when it comes to number of apps and developers making apps. For a new developer, the iPhone may provide less-than-ideal conditions for selling the apps with the approval process and all that, but at the same time there are more devices available and so more people to sell to, which makes the iPhone a more appealing platform. The other contenders, relatively new on the market, have few people using their OS at the moment which provides less of an incentive for developers to focus on them. Of course that will change over time, and there’s something to be said for new markets after all, but Apple was first and will profit from that for a long time.

Both Android and Maemo are open source and Maemo in particular might have a whole army of Maemo developers to back them up, but that might not necessarily be a good thing. I’ve had a Maemo device and had no trouble using it, however it wasn’t exactly the most user friendly device out there. The core Maemo that the N900 runs will be more polished and user friendly, however I can’t help to think there will be a split between power users (read: Linux geeks) and mainstream consumers (read: wannabe-geeks) which will make the platform a rather peculiar mix of people where Nokia’s customer support will be run down by mainstream consumers who have tried something they saw on a Maemo forum and failed miserably.

The Palm Pre has completely other problems altogether. The SDK (software development kit, “user manual” to make apps) is based off web languages like HTML and javascript which means it’s easy to develop for but severely limited in what it can actually do, especially with regards to gaming. Think of it (extremely simplified) like trying to create 3D animated movies like Toy Story/Ice Age/Shrek etc with colored pencils. It can’t be done. There have been rumours or at least speculations that Palm will open the platform to full hardware access in the future (like on other phones) but only time will tell. Without it however, they will most likely have a very hard time competing as gaming is quickly becoming a major aspect of the iPhone and other platforms have started to include better graphics processors to get in on the fun.

BlackBerry is sort of the lone wanderer in all of this. It’s not antiquated like Windows Mobile and S60 simply because it’s still probably the best platform out there for messaging and business use. Yet, it’s nowhere near getting the media fuzz that the new devices get, probably because it’s less of a platform for young people and more for “real” adults. Most the smartphone OSes these days support things like Microsoft Exchange and other PIM (Personal Information Mangement) features such as calendars and whatnot so BlackBerry isn’t king of it’s own thing anymore (or it might be king, but there are princes all around).

The future

So how will the war end? I really have no idea. If I were to guess, I think the iPhone will continue to be the mainstream of the mainstream devices, Maemo and Nokia will be the choice for the hardware geeks and the linux geeks, Android will be the non-iPhone iPhone and the Palm Pre will be the better-than-iPhone iPhone. Blackberyy will most likely continue to wander around on it’s own, doing it’s own thing. When Windows Mobile 7 comes out that will also get a place, however I doubt it will be that big.

No matter what the future will be, it sure will be interesting. Competition is good, and from a personal point of view I hope the competition will force Apple to react more quickly to competition and open up the iPhone a bit more. No matter what flaws it might have, it’s still my cell phone of choice and I doubt that will change for a while.