The Great Game

Nice piece by Tim Bray on the state of the mobile market:

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

But who’s in the race? Bray argues that it’s down to Android and iOS:

Thus I think there’s a good chance that while Gruber’s right about the no-monopoly bit, he may be wrong about the several-times-20-40% bit, at least in the Net-phone market: for the next little while it’ll be two players, with market shares something like 80/20 or 60/40 or 50/50.

He may be right. I’m loath to write off BlackBerry though — I see too many of them in the wild. And here’s a story today in The Guardian arguing that BlackBerrys are the smartphone of choice for teenagers in the UK. I don’t think BlackBerry will ever catch Android and iOS in terms of web surfing and apps, but Android and iOS might never catch BlackBerry in terms of messaging. I’m also loath to write off Windows Phone 7. What if WP7 is a best-of-breed mobile gaming platform?

A great game, indeed.

★ Monday, 2 August 2010