Opensource OS for mobile is coming of age



This week, Barcelona Spain is the centre of the Mobile universe. The Mobile World Congress is in full swing and manufacturers, developers and the media are in for a beautiful showcase of this years biggest innovations in mobile technology. 

Although the trend recently has been for manufacturers to launch major product iterations with their own media events (Apple, Samsung, Blackberry, Windows etc), the Mobile World Congress is still expected to showcase some major advancements in mobile. Samsung will still be making an appearance and has shown the new Galaxy Note 8.0 to compete directly with the iPad mini and Kindle Fire HD. Other than this announcement, nobody is expecting anything else major from Samsung. Apple will never launch anything outside it uber hyped media events. Microsoft has decided to bask in its perceived success with Surface Pro and Windows 8, and Blackberry has decided- wrongly- that it did enough with its Z10 announcement last month. 

Despite these no-shows, the Mobile World Congress is still set to impress from the new players. This year, it looks like the major announcements will be coming mostly from manufacturers like Sony, HTC, Huwawei, ZTE, etc. These manufacturers are poised to show the world- meaning Apple and Google- that they are serious in taking a bite at the multi-billion dollar mobile tech industry. These manufacturers are expected to make use of the grand stage offered by MWC and the enormous media presence during the event to make some ground shaking announcements. 

People are expected to get a treat in two major areas in Mobile- the hardware and software component. Although hardware innovations are cool and glitzy, that is not really what I am excited about. Unless they announce something high-tech and sexy like a flexible and transparent smartphone coming this year, hardware can take a back-seat for me. I am more interested in what is coming in the software side. I also believe that smartphones to-date have enough computing power to be truly intelligent smartphones but they lack the software to make it all make sense. This is why I want to see some major software advancements in MWC. Another reason I think hardware will take a back-seat this year is the economy. Manufacturers I believe will be focusing more on cashing in on the economies of scale of their hardware. I believe they will focus more on making cheaper smartphones utilizing the efficiency they have achieved in their manufacturing process. This trend should create a push for software to be the key product differentiation for mobile this year. 

The announcements I am eager to follow in this years MWC are the surprises Mozilla and Ubuntu has for their mobile OS. It would be interesting to see the OS perform in actual production ready handsets. A new operating system to me is important especially in our Mobile tech world dominated by Apple and Google. I am cheering for Firefox OS and Ubuntu not only for variety's sake but mainly to put pressure on the duopoly we currently have in the OS side of our mobile life. I know Blackberry recently launched a "killer" OS and Microsoft seems to finally get it right with Windows 8 but these incumbents lack the Open Source platform Firefox and Ubuntu is offering. To me this is the key and the winning formula for both Firefox and Ubuntu. Being Opensource will allow them to gain traction with developers and telco providers- just look at Androids success in overrunning iOS, Symbian, and Windows for Mobile in the last few years. Openness of the OS is most attractive for telco providers as it allows them to customize user experience to suit their business model more. From the developers standpoint both Firefox and Ubuntu is attractive as it allows them direct access to the users instead of having to go thru a store front like Apple's AppStore and Google's Playstore- the HTML5 base and Opensource nature of both OS makes this possible. Being Opensource means it is also cheap for manufacturers to adopt it in new product iterations focused mainly in the low-end smartphone market. This is great for all players in the Mobile industry- developers, manufacturers and telco providers- as the low-end smartphone market is considered to have the most growth potential. 

If you want to read more about Mozilla Firefox OS for mobile click here and for Ubuntu click here. 

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