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There was far more media fuss than usual over the latest quarterly smartphone figures from research firm IDC – well, at least the report did something different, amid the floods of forecasts of just how big a lead Android will take, by putting Windows Phone 7, not Apple iOS, in second place. The Microsoft OS will overtake iOS by 2015, says IDC, and by a considerable margin (21% versus 15.3%, both well behind Google’s 45%).

Of course, predictions as far out as four years are pretty impossible when it comes to smartphones and their operating systems. Not only will several new form factors and OSs have hit the mobile market by 2015 (particularly ‘cloudbooks’ with systems like Chrome OS), but all the current software platforms will have changed dramatically. Microsoft and Apple are both looking to bring their desktop and mobile OSs closer together while adding more cloud functionality; RIM is likely to have merged its handset and tablet platforms; Android could have headed off in any number of new directions. Just to add another dimension of flakiness to the IDC forecast, it relies heavily on the assumption that a large slice of the current Symbian base will migrate to WP7 because of Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft.

This is a very difficult assumption to make, and beyond the party game of mulling device forecasts, it raises the very real issue of where the Symbian base will go. There are three big variables. One is how long Symbian itself will survive. The OS still has the smartphone market lead in many emerging economies and some European bases, and is likely to hold onto about 20% of the total base in 2011 despite its rapidly approaching end-of-life. The area where it has been most resilient has been the mass market – affordable smartphones that have full apps and browsers but are in a different price/performance league to iPhones and Galaxys. This base could give Symbian a survival plan that could still be in place in 2015, especially with signs that many operators are keen to invest in it for the medium term, as a counterweight to the only other viable full OS in the emerging economies, Android.

So IDC’s speculation that only 2% of smart devices will ship with Symbian in 2015 may be too pessimistic – but even if the ageing OS has disappeared completely, in these key bases, it is more likely to have been replaced by Android than anything else. Apple and RIM have made few real efforts at cultivating new economies because of their cost/margin structures. Microsoft has experience of pushing cutdown products into emerging markets on the PC side, and it has made some noises around Windows, notably its China-focused alliance with Mediatek., presumably targeting low cost phones. But WP7 is firmly in the premier league alongside iPhone at the moment, and Nokia has made it clear it will use its new OS initially to fill the gaping holes in its high end market presence, especially in the US. Although it has the intention and capability to apply its scale to WP7 to make it into a mass market platform, this will not have shifted the market significantly by 2015 (it will unveil first generation WP7 smartphones at the end of this year but its full- blown Windows experience will not appear on high end products until mid-2012. We would expect the first low cost gadgets in 2013 at the earliest).

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