Android And Symbian Might Merge; iPhone Still Best

According to VentureBeat Android and Symbian, two open source mobile operating systems, might merge. Symbian has been around since 1998 and has been deployed to over 200 million phones, as opposed to a mere 8 million iPhones.

The status quo in the mobile programming community is made of a couple of major platforms or soon to be major platforms. RIM has its own operating system built around a JAVA framework, Nokia has Symbian, Sony and a couple others use Windows Mobile, Android, and of course the iPhone. Each framework has its own quirks and style, porting a single application to more than a couple of these frameworks is a grueling and annoying process.

I contend that the iPhone is by far the most advanced platform with the best hardware. The two major disadvantages to a mobile phone as an internet communication device are (1) screen size and (2) control. There is no other form factor or design that is better at maximizing screen size and control than the iPhone.

With that in mind, I must disagree with the VCs that have said that the proper strategy in the mobile revolution is to hedge your bets and deploy across multiple platforms. I think a smart bet is not wasting time on trying to create a watered down mobile application to spread across multiple neanderthal platforms but rather creating an awesome application for the iPhone and port over slowly to phones that enter the same realm of excellence.

There are a couple of advantages to this strategy; (1) you can spend more time developing your application as opposed to learning stupid frameworks that'll probably be insignificant in 5 years and (2) it allows you to create better applications to leverage the screen size, 3G, GPS, and touch-screen on the iPhone.