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By Paul Biba

Picture 1.pngOver at ZDNet Jason Hiner has one of the best articles I’ve read about the state of the smartphone market, and the prospects for its various players.

This is an important topic for e-books because smartphones, from everything I read, are the fastest growing segment of the phone market today. Each and every one of these smartphones can make a very capable e-book reader. I have a Palm Treo 680 which runs the Palm OS, MWg Zinc II which runs Windows Mobile, iPhone, and a Nokia E71 which runs Symbian. All of these phone make decent e-book readers and all of them have ereading software available from Fictionwise and other sources. Despite the hype over the Kindle and Sony Reader, it is very possible that the future of ereading may be on the phone.

Take a look at Jason’s article. He doesn’t think that Android stands much of a chance, and I agree with him:

However, the big problem with Android is that it is not a business-ready smartphone, unless you are running your company e-mail through Gmail and your productivity suite is Google Apps. The rest of the world – and that’s most of us – are out of luck because Android requires a Google login and basically ties only to Google software. There’s no Exchange support, and advanced IT security and manageability are lacking.

Google has also had a difficult time wooing developers to Android, despite the fact that it made the software open source. One of the problems is that Google angered some of its Android developers by only releasing the software development kit (SDK) to an exclusive group of developers at one point during the preparation to bring the G1 to market.

For all of those reasons, I think Android is likely to get squeezed and open source mobile developers are much more likely to jump board with Symbian or even Palm. However, Android could become a big hit on netbooks ….

 
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