Simon en-cycling to SMIN!

In less than 10 years the smartphone game has eclipsed its humble beginnings of combining a PDA with a phone. The App-ing Generation T who communicate and share across technologies can have an ice cream sandwich in their operating system or a mountain lion or faster graphics performance with ivy. Poorer consumers across the developing world simply want a phone to curve with messaging and FM radio and a 2 mega pixel camera. But do you remember where you were in 1992 when we witnessed the planting of the seed of the smartphone tree with the inaugural launch of the IBM Simon? Do you care? How many remember the first smartphone, the Ericsson GS88 with the open OS Symbian? That was 1997. By the time it had re-launched in 2000 as R380, the Palm Kyocera 6035 enabled you to phone a friend from your PDA contact list. So cool! How many remember the Palm Kyocera 6035? That was 2001. In 2012 Generation T eagerly await the global launch of Apple iPhone5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3. Analysts are reporting that Apple and Samsung could account for 30% of volume and 52% of sales in the global smartphone game. The game is less about the device or product – it is more about the ecosystem, the operating system in the game of smartphones. We are observing a battle of OS standards through the lens of a convergence in technology that will end the game because time available to the key players, young and old, from Apple to Samsung, from MS to Nokia, from HTC to Sony Ericsson to RIM, to make a decision is diminishing in time itself. In others words the game is en-cycling to an end point as spherical competitors from anywhere at any time are entering the game: the Nokia-MS alliance with Lumia platforms powered by Win8 and supported by Intel and AT&T, MS-Facebook alliance to challenge Google in social media and in search with a new search engine, a possible MS-Nokia-RIM-Dell alliance, emergence of Huawei and ZTE, of China Mobile and Data Wind. Who? The game started with Simon in 1992 and will end with the must-have small and thin, SMIN, the outcome that Generation T, the customer, wants rather than the device that produces it. Think on to 2022 and the Blog reader asks: who was Apple? But who is SMIN? Ref back to early Blog entries: The Brontosaurus paradox

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