MWC and the OS fire -February 4th

By Martin Wilde

Heading into Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain later this month (14-17 Feb), numerous questions around mobile operating systems continue to emerge. The next release of Android, Honeycomb 3.0, is coming this week. It will not be fully compatible with previous Android versions, mostly in the UI, and will result in more fragmentation headaches for Google.

Adding fuel to the OS fire, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said recently that, "Nokia must compete on an ecosystem-to-ecosystem basis. In addition to great devices, we must build, catalyze, and/or join a competitive ecosystem." Are we witnessing a new, multiplatform smartphone strategy from the cellphone giant? What does this mean for Symbian and MeeGo, which both lack a coherent ecosystem? Will Nokia will adopt a 3^rd-party OS? Since Elop came from the great US Northwest, will we see a renewed push into WP7 ?

Some tried, and not so true, OS decisions are just around the corner. What do you think will happen?