Gadgetory

for the longest time the discussion has been who will take that third position in the running with iOS and Android now the discussion is begining to tilt a little bit away from who to whether running Windows Phone 8 as its operating system this Lumia has 4g LTE and NFC in addition to the usual smartphone capabilities you won't find any buttons on the phones face and that's because the z10 uses only a series of gestures to navigate around this is the home screen of Tizen this operating system wants to go head-to-head with Android you can see you have your apps arranged on the home screen as opposed to Android there is no normal home screen that you fill with widgets and then a separate app tray the app tray is the home screen if you like in the bottom right you have a back button which is quite similar to how Android works while over on the left you get this context sensitive menu which will display different things depending on what you're looking at thanks to the new Snapdragon 800 processor pages and menus are accessed near immediately look at this global market share data from gartner there's Android then there's iOS below that and then everyone else rolls up into an eye test at the bottom and worse than that either not trending or trending the wrong way similar us data from emarketer there's windows phone blackberry and other rolling up to take increasingly less share of the overall market as time goes on it's not the direction you want to be going and we'll talk about Microsoft's specific prospects in a future episode but whoever wants a challenge for that third seat or even prove it exists they've got to get these things done in my mind first of all be different but recognizable that's kind of a tightrope to walk you want to be different enough to justify switching pain from whatever platform the user is already on but at the same time be common enough to have an answer to every arrow in iOS and androids quiver that's a lot of arrows next it seems as though you have to do your own hardware I mean much to my surprise look how things have shaken out Apple of course has always done hardware now look at Google with Motorola Microsoft soon to have nokia amazon's kind of in there as well it looks as though if you want to be in this battle you've got to be able to fight it on two fronts be affordable perhaps the only low-hanging fruit left in the mobile business is in the low or lower-cost market either socioeconomically or geographically around the globe finally be simple by that I mean simple in terms of how I use the device its interface and its services but also simple in understanding why I would do so and either leave one of the entrenched guys or get into Mobile's for the first time which many millions of folks are about to do