Smartphone Industry today

Paradigm shift in the Smartphone Industry
RIM was 5 years in to the smartphone industry when Apple introduced its 1st generation iPhone in 2007. Inspite of being a late entrant to the smartphone industry, Apple set a start for a new era for phones that are smart. Apple introduced new and better ways to interact with the mobile phones through the touch screen and customizable user interfaces. This introduced a groundbreaking user experience and the open platform model gave way to the rise of the third party application developers market. Being an early entrant in to the market benefited Apple with a total of over 2 billion application download by September 2009 by when the competitors such as Palm, Android and Blackberry had just started scrambling to get a piece of the pie. Apple hadn't just introduced a mobile gadget but an entire ecosystem in which Apple had been thriving.

Google came with a different strategy of providing an easy and inexpensive mobile platform(operating system) that enables the entire smartphone industry to adopt. Google has made its platform available through a number of device manufacturers and through a number of carriers. In contrast to Apple, Google's mobile ecosystem is much larger that will eventually enable Google to outshine Apple. In fact, Google's Android smartphone market share in the last quarter of 2010 was reported to be higher than that of Apple.
Microsoft had been long struggling to gain traction in the market, and in fact its market share in the smartphone platform has dropped by 2 % in 2010. The recent partnership announcement between Nokia and Microsoft might pose good opportunity for Microsoft to capture the Nokia's primary (non-US) market, but the analysts suspect that it might take 2 years for the Nokia-Microsoft integration to be completed. This is definitely a long time in the rapidly changing smartphone industry. But the partners might not also target on commoditizing the smartphones in the next two years and introducing low price smartphones in the emerging market in which Nokia is already a pioneer.

Apple's iPhone transformed how manufacturers build phones and its capabilities and thus the customer's expectations from mobile phones.
Touch screen is no more a luxury in a phone but it's a must feature to have that has become a de-facto standard. The handset manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and HTC are making significant efforts to out-beat Apple.
HTC had been making its way forward in capturing smartphone market share by consistently introducing smartphones with newer and better technologies. In 2008, HTC produced the first phone to use the Android system and with the Evo, HTC became the first phone maker in the U.S. to come out with a handset that could access the 4G network. Samsung with its new Galaxy portfolio of phones powered with Android, is expected to capture a decent share of the smartphone industry.
LG had been struggling to keep on pace with the smartphone race though the low-end market has served as cash cow for LG in the past. But recently in the mobile world congress, LG introduced its first 3D mobile device (Optimus 3D) on Android platform, the first one to bring 3D contents in user's hands. If this makes big, the smartphone market would have a new dimension of competition based on 3D technology.

Now what should Apple do? Stay tuned!