PC and PDA vendors could seriously swing the smartphone market in Microsoft's favor, according to wireless telecoms research and consulting firm, ARCchart. If the PC and PDA vendors do enter the market, ARCchart estimates that by 2008 it would cut the Symbian operating system's market share lead to just 8 percentage points above the Windows Mobile for Smartphone (WMS) platform, giving Microsoft an overall 33% market share.

According to ARCchart, the PC and PDA vendors have yet to play their smartphone hand. However, they are well suited to operating in the increasingly commoditised conditions of the mobile handset market, and they have established sales channels into which they can sell smartphone products. Dell in particular has been notably reluctant to enter the market because of Nokia's hegemony, and the role of the network operators in the product distribution chain, but both these barriers should diminish over time.

"Nokia will see its current 36% handset market share eroded, as platform hardware standardization continues to draw new low cost Asian entrants into the mobile handset market," said Matt Lewis, ARCchart senior analyst. "The PC vendors will also increasingly be able to bundle their own smartphone products as a component of complete enterprise IT solutions. This will grow the natural market for Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS. "

ARCchart divides the mobile handset market into three key device classes, the basic vanilla phone, the multimedia-capable feature phone, and the application-extensible smartphone. Ongoing bill of materials (BoM) erosion leads ARCchart to forecast that smartphone handsets will constitute 40% of the total handset market by 2008. "As smartphones running standardized OS platforms make up a greater percentage of the handset market, so the dissemination of profits from this industry will increasingly be determined by whoever has control of the OSs" said Adrian Drury, the report's lead analyst, "Nokia has the most to loose in this fight, and its weapon of choice is Symbian, as demonstrated by its recent efforts to cement its control over the company via the acquisition of Psion's stake"

However, Microsoft has the luxury of theoretically being able to subsidize its WMS platform across its product groups, and a major discontinuity scenario hanging over the industry is that it opts to cut the license cost of Windows Mobile for Smartphone to zero. Microsoft is not in the smartphone game for the license fee revenue. In its report, ARCchart examined the legal ramifications of such an aggressive pricing strategy and concluded that the software giant is regulator-bound in this market to be a price taker.

Is Linux a viable contender? The open source platform has attracted a lot of attention as a basis for proprietary OS offerings from the handset vendors themselves, with J2ME employed as an application development environment. A detailed examination by ARCchart of the economics of developing Linux into a fully functional smartphone OS suggests however that it is more likely to be pushed into the smartphone space by independent specialist Linux developers, such as the profiled MiZi Research and Trolltech. ARCchart also identifies other start-ups looking to enter the smartphone OS race, the Vodafone and Orange-backed SavaJe, China MobileSoft, and Hopen. Operating system markets greatly favor an early-mover advantage, and this is already creating barriers to entry, but price sensitive markets are creating niche opportunities.