Which mobile development platforms are supported by the USA carriers?

Carriers tightly control mobile devices, wireless network, and applications which get deployed to those devices. This is one of the big differences faced by developers who may be more used to building Internet applications in an unrestricted, open environment. In addition different carriers support different standards thus further complicating the landscape.

The USA market is dominated by three carriers, who jointly own 70% of mobile subscribers as depicted by the diagram below. Consequently we will focus on these three carriers.



All three carriers support SMS and mobile web. All three offer a number of smartphones and PDAs. The biggest difference is in Java and BREW support. Verizon embraced BREW while Cingular and Sprint are in the J2ME camp. Subsequently – beyond SMS and mobile web – there is no single platform targeting the wide variety of devices supported by all carriers.

More information for developers can be found on the carrier websites:

• Cingular devCentral
• Sprint Developers
• Verizon Developers

For overview of the mobile development platforms please refer to the earlier posts:

Mobile Messaging
Mobile Web
Mobile Java
BREW
Symbian
Mobile Linux
Microsoft Windows Mobile Platform
PDA Operating Systems

PDA Market Update

Information Week - in its October 30, 2006 issue - published good overview of the current state of the PDA market.

The highlights are:

• In the first half of 2006 38.5 million smartphones were shipped worldwide (75% more than in the the first half of 2005)
• IDC predicts 8 million samrtphones will ship in the USA in 2006 (up 54% from 2005)
• RIM continues to dominate USA market (53% of the market in 2005) but it has only 6% of the global market
• Nokia has 67% of the world market but had only 5% of the USA market in 2005
• The biggest threat to RIM is the Windows Mobile operating system now on phones from Cingular, HP, Motorola, Palm, Sprint and others
• Motorola made successfull entry into market - the company sold more than 150,000 Moto Q phones in the first 30 days after its release

You can find full article writen by Elena Malykhina here. You can also find comparison chart of smartphones on the Information Week site.