Which mobile platform is your favorite?
briansmith: Based on what's happening today, I'd say that (1) Symbian will take control of the phone-first-computer-second market and, (2) Windows Mobile will slowly take over the computer-first-phone-second market, (3) Apple's marketshare will mirror its computer marketshare, (4) Android will get squeezed out of the market unless there is an ad-subsidized phone revolution (unlikely), (5) Either Nokia or Microsoft will buy RIM, and (6) price is going to be a much bigger factor in the long-run at the top of the market, and Nokia, Samsung, and Sony-Ericcson have a big advantage there because of its experience building mass-market feature phones.Look at what is happening today at MWC: Samsung, Sony-Ericcson, and Nokia all announced amazing Symbian-powered devices. HTC and LG both made huge commitments to Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile got a huge upgrade. Meanwhile, Android was almost absent from the show, and Apple literally didn't even show up.There's only one commercially-available Android phone, being subsidized by only one major operator (AFAICT). I can't find any evidence that it is gaining any momentum; in fact, the evidence seems to show that Symbian has gained a lot of momentum at its expense. Besides that, Symbian just seems technologically superior. Nokia just announced a Symbian-powered phone with a one-MONTH standby time. The G1 cannot even last through a single day. If you've programmed for both, you can see why: everything about Symbian's design revolves around a relentless desire to conserve resources. Android's main contribution might end up being the open-sourcing of Symbian.The iPhone gained a lot of mindshare but soon it will be one out of many similar devices. Feature-for-feature, every single other manufacturer has them beat, hands down. The iPhone's only advantage is in ease-of-use. That's a big advantage now, and the iPhone will continue to thrive as long as its competitors provide sub-par user experiences. But, once the other vendors get their acts together, the iPhone won't have any advantage whatsoever. The same applies to Mac OS X on the desktop as well.Samsung, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson are close to having application binary compatibility across their smartphones. And, Nokia has started moving Symbian down market into midrange phones. If they can all agree to build compatible phones and if S60 replaces Series 40, Symbian will have an absolutely massive market share.I think Windows Mobile will succeed in the corporate world if they can build enough tools into the platform to make building mobile enterprise applications as easy as they've made enterprise development on the desktop. At some point I think Microsoft's leverage in the corporate IT world will cause a lot of problems for Blackberry.