I have worked in mobile telephone development and deployment with nearly all the major vendors of handsets. In fact, I've had piles of project managers and developers from nearly every firm babysitting my projects for years. It's incredibly annoying. To this day, after working on 15 major smart phone development projects, I to this day have no idea what these vendors are thinking, or more to the point if they're thinking. With the exception of Sony Ericsson who at least takes the time to admit that they don't know everything, the rest of the vendors just make blunder after blunder which causes their phones to be released late or they simply miss their release windows and move development to the next project.

I have suffered through painful toolchain disasters brought on by Symbian. I have suffered through disgusting windowing toolkit reinventions by Motorola. I have anguished through GUI redesign problems by UIQ. I have drowned in the chaos of Ericsson botching the initial reference design of bluetooth by merging it with a project too big to chew in a limited time. I can even tell you of failed attempt after failed attempt of creating GSM/GPRS stacks by intern students at most vendors. I can go on and on and on.

So let me start getting to a point here. Nokia could have done something great back in the day when they adopted Symbian, but they failed miserably because they could have started from the ground up and made something great, but instead they bought into a lie.

See, Symbian is a market share holder not because of great technology, it is a market share holder because of great marketing. This is a problem for Nokia now since iPhone is actually almost great technology with awesome marketing behind it. Apple can in fact take this market by storm and go straight for monopolization by playing the underdog card until everyone realizes it's too late. The technology has started off expensive, but Apple will eventually release mini and nano versions of the iPhone which cost less and still provide a great deal of functionality.

What Apple did was simple. They made use of technology that they developed over a period of several years, focussed on a single telephone product, bought the right parts from the right vendors, invented better pieces where they were needed and put it in a pretty package. They spent 6 years building a the strongest media delivery service ever seen.

So who could possibly compete against that? Well, I'll tell you, there are a few strong possiblities.

Microsoft could if they would take hardware design serious for once. They have the talent, but they prefer to waste their money in marketting as opposed to developing a product that could nearly sell itself.

Amazon could do it since they could buy most of the technology firms they need and then merge their content business with it.

Walmart might even be able to pull it off if they were in fact interested in this.

Sony, not Sony Ericsson might be able to do it, but only if they bite the bullet and actually recognize that consumers love the content pricing model of iTunes Music Store.

Creative could partner with Microsoft, Walmart or Amazon and pull it off. But they have to be willing to commit to a single model that rocks as opposed to multiple generations of models that just don't pull it off.

Let me focus on Creative for a while since my brainstorming as brought me to the only competitor that seems to have been able to feed themselves when competing against iPod.

Creative has the hardware engineering talent, but they lack the asthetic design talent. Not once has Creative made a single device that catches the eye like the iPod does. Creative misses the mark because they think that iPod is about features when the first attraction for most can be boiled down to "Oooh... Shiny!!!". The iPod catches the consumers eye by simply looking cool. If you want to get the consumer attention, it's about giving them something flashy and pretty.

Usability has been a huge problem for Creative. They experimented with all kinds of different ways of sticking songs onto phones, but the truth is, they have never come close. From trying tools like MusicMatch to Winamp plugins, to custome made crapware, they have always missed the mark. The reason is simple, they don't just KISS. iTunes is a force to be reckoned with since any idiot can use it. It doesn't give the users any of the functionality of the more powerful programs (including Windows Media Player or Zune), but it does make it so simple that anyone could use it. The goal isn't to go after the power user... if the technology is stable and solid, the power user will produce their own solution. The goal is to get the general consumer.

Creative needs to give their software away for free, make it a strong alternative to iTunes. iTunes doesn't ship on many computers, instead it's either installed via CD from an iPod box or it's downloaded by a ton of users. Make a great player application and just give it away for free. Make it work on Windows, Mac, AND Linux, and most importantly, DO NOT WRITE IT IN JAVA. Write the application in C++ and Qt. Write the drivers independantly for each platform. Provide a customized file system so that when a user browses the device, the system files do not appear to the user. It will obviously be hacked soon enough, but for the basic user, there's nothing to be confused by.

Now, here's the next bit. If the goal is to compete with iPhone, a PDA is a must. Alot of solutions exist for this, but the fact is, beyond an OS kernel, there's no such thing as a good UI. So here's what I'd do.

Install Windows Mobile, yes Windows Mobile. Forget the GUI provided by the operating system, it's crap and it looks too much like a PC. Think phone. Nokia became successful by shipping a crappy operating system with a stable communications controller and a simple single Icon per screen selection. Make this one simple too. Here's how.

Go to Opera Software, insist that they alter their OpenGL based rendering to support mobile DirectX instead, their developers are very bright and can do this with little effort.

Hire a top notch web development team that can develop "Web 2.0" applications. The people you're looking for are artists that make the best Windows Gadgets and Opera Widgets. These people are bright and artistic and do a great job.

Use the Opera client side ecmascript engine to provide "objects" to the telephone functions. I'm quite sure they already have many of them available.

Go to Adobe and pay the license to the Flash player. Macromedia was vicious about this, but I hear Adobe is more friendly. Make sure to get Acrobat as well... AND GET CODE TO PRODUCE PDF AS WELL.

Develop into the desktop application the ability to sync contacts between the phone and Outlook, Vista Mail/Calendar, Lotus Notes, and Thunderbird/Sunbird, I guess Apple Mail and Address Book and iCal would help as well. Do no reinvent the wheel, use what's there.

Java might be necessary for service providers, but thanks to Web 2.0, it's probably not that important.

Now that the phone has a basic design, focus on an SDK. The phone must be easy to develop applets for. Make it so that making a new applet can be done by anyone. Every single object needs to be clearly documented and the entire installation proceedure needs to be flawless and well documented. People should not be confused as to how this is done.

The most important thing that needs to be understood at this point is, once this system is made, only evolution is allowed. User testing labs should be paid for in Asian, European, and American markets. Professional services should be used to make sure that the UI is easy to use and more importantly, when placed on a shelf with 10 other phones for the user to choose from, they will choose this one off the shelf to take home with them for free.

Once the phone is designed, the packaging and styling is sorted out, a marketting campaign needs to be launch that doesn't focus on making the phone better than iPhone, but instead should market it based on its user friendliness, openness and other merits. The consumer should be interested in seeing it because it is affordable and won't make them feel stupid.

Work out deals with Slingbox or Tivo for copying directly to the device. Make it clear that the user isn't locked into content from your store. Make it clear that the user has the freedom to choose.

Well, I can go on for a while, but frankly, I am quite confident that Microsoft, HTC, Creative, Nokia and Ericsson which just continue on bumbling down the road trying over and over again to clobber the mammoth and they just won't invest what it takes to actually compete against Apple which is a company that manages to maintain approximately 10% of the world PC market, 75% of the world music player market and are quickly making inroads into other markets. These companies will just thing that iPhone is a passing fad up until Apple releases the consumer priced phones which just pound them senseless.

I would like to point out the most important reason Apple which succeed if noone else steps up, they develop the technology in harmony. They build an environment where development teams produce all the components with the hope of making something truly cool. They don't waste time blaming everyone else for failures, they focus on what matters, the product!

P.S. - If anyone at Nokia is listening, I'm willing to gamble a chunk of my salary on the fact that iPhone will crush anything Symbian based. Not because I don't like Symbian (which I don't), but because Apple recognized that Symbian wasn't an option and understood they had to start from the bottom up. Symbian was obsoleted the day users wanted more than just a PIM.

Tags: creative labs, ericsson, htc, iphone, ipod, microsoft, nokia, pim, symbian