The war for your pocket!

So, I just wanted to get this idea out of my head because it is rattling around in there and disturbing me! ;) Rather than taking things out of my pocket, recently vendors seem to want to put things in there! ....like "the web"....

I sense there is a "battle royal" emerging between Nokia, Apple and Google and the Others for final victory in the sadly unloved US mobile market. I have blogged before about Ms. Fiorina's "digital, mobile, virtual and personal" approach to the future of information and knowledge management, but now it is starting to truly look real in the US.

Apple made the market feel different with the iPhone and then made it exciting/real/possible with the 3G iphone - plus 3rd party apps, cool developer tools for us all, enterprise functionality, maps that work, etc etc etc.

Nokia owns probably as much market share in the handset space as all it's competitors combined. But they have 4.6 million (I exaggerate) handsets to choose from (Apple has...er...one) and they are all fairly "ho hum" through reliable...a bit like a Volvo really...(Scandinavia theme here?). Anyway, with their purchase of the Symbian o/s recently, they are setting themselves up to address hardware and software. Nokia's great claim to fame was always that they would work with any provider to make their platform function as advertised. In fact my very first few phones were all Nokia - reliable, easy to use, minimalistic. Now, unless they make their phones 21st century usable and cool (no that does not mean colors and fancy ringtones or graphics) then this move may be too little too late. Maybe a design competitor would help?

Google and the Android platform is the big unknown here. It sounded great at launch then went flat. The problem is that users just want to get things done, stay in touch, have one "digital device" that does it all. How hard can that be? Software alone or hardware alone do not cut it. Even both together are not sufficient if tasks are too hard to carry out and the connectivity is poor. Time for another Google marriage...with Nokia? and/or with a service provider?

Others for me has to include HTC, who continue to bring out marvelous phones that catch up in a cluttered and weird market dominated by carriers stranglehold on the hardware guys.

So....does Apple have the new business model? Do we all have to sell our souls to AT&T? Is there another paradigm shifting competitor out there? How can I get out of my new 2 year contact with t-mobile? Do I have to? Will the US ever have better connectivity and basic mobile phone services than Ghana, West Africa or Europe 10 years ago? Answers to all these questions and more during this year's holiday sales push...maybe I will reading it on my new opensource device...is anybody ready for this?