The most common operating systems (OS) used in smartphones
Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd. (46.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008 )
Symbian has the largest share in most markets worldwide, but lags behind other companies in the relatively small but highly visible North American market.This matches the success of its owner and largest customer, Nokia, in all markets except Japan. Nokia itself enjoys 52.9% of the smartphone market.In Japan Symbian is strong due to a relationship with NTT DoCoMo, with only one of the 44 Symbian handsets released in Japan coming from Nokia.It is used by many major handset manufacturers, including BenQ, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. Various implementations of user interfaces on top of Symbian (most notable being UIQ and Nokia's own S60) are incompatible, which along with the requirement that applications running on mobile phones be signed is hindering the potential for a truly widely accepted mobile application platform. It has received some adverse press attention due to virus threats (namely trojan horses).
iPhone OS from Apple Inc. (17.3% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
The iPhone and iPod Touch use an operating system called iPhone OS, which is derived from Mac OS X. Third party applications were not officially supported until the release of iPhone OS 2.0 on July 11th 2008. Before this,"jailbreaking" allowed third party applications to be installed, and this method is still available.
BlackBerry OS from RIM (15.2% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
This OS is focused on easy operation and was originally designed for business. Recently it has seen a surge in third-party applications and has been improved to offer full multimedia support.
Windows Mobile from Microsoft (13.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
The Windows CE operating system and Windows Mobile middleware are widely spread in Asia
Improved variants of this operating system, Windows Mobile 6 Professional (for touch screen devices) and Windows Mobile 6 Standard, were unveiled in February 2007. Current release is Windows Mobile version 6.5
Linux operating system (5.1% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Linux is strongest in China where it is used by Motorola, and in Japan, used by DoCoMo. Rather than being a platform in its own right, Linux is used as a basis for a number of different platforms developed by several vendors, including Motorola and TrollTech, which are mostly incompatible.The recently released webOS, considered the successor to Palm OS, is also linux based. Another platform based on Linux and named LiMo is being developed by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone.
Palm OS developed by PalmSource (now a subsidiary of ACCESS)
PalmSource traditionally used its own platform developed by Palm Inc. Access Linux Platform (ALP) is an improvement that was planned to be launched in the first half of 2007. It will use technical specifications from the Linux Phone Standards Forum. The Access Linux Platform will include an emulation layer to support applications developed for Palm-based devices.
Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)
BREW was developed in the USA by Qualcomm, Inc and is popular in North America and Japan . BREW is a mobile application development platform and end-to-end content delivery ecosystem. BREW has recently gained a foothold in Europe via the 3 Skypephones offered by network 3.
Android promoted by Open Handset Alliance and licensed by Google(Released 22 Oct 2008)
Android, which was developed by Google. Android was developed as a platform that could be run on many devices. Android has yet to own even a small part of the smartphone market.
Google is promoting APIs to Google's services, hence disclosing a distinct marketing strategy..
The Android OS is currently only on the HTC Dream (G1), running on T-Mobile USA's network
Sprint also plans to sell an Android powered phone sometime in 2009.



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