They way I've seen it for about at least a year now is that the mobile computing world is becoming a commodity, just like the desktop computing world, and in a commodity world there are only major platforms and not big manufacturers.

Consider Windows and the PC hardware brands: generally there's not much difference between Dell, Samsung, HP, Lenovo and the rest. For example, most people are buying laptops these days. Sure, all the brands have little niches: some are considered durable and professional, some focus on the cheap segment and some focus on the pricey end, some make big gamers' laptops and some make small travel laptops. But they're all brands and brands are all about what people think and not much about reality. This means that my mother can choose any laptop she want and even the cheapest one has many, many times more power and features than she needs.

For the mobile world, the transition to a commodity took place when phones became computers. Cellphones are a relatively new invention and new market, and in the beginning it was enough to just reliably manufacture a working phone. Not every company could do even that! The best hardware quite a lot better than the worst hardware.

Then gradually the phone hardware become a commodity. The dysfunctional designs got weeded out. Manufacturing got centralized to companies specializing in specific chips or chipsets. These days a company without lots of experience and history in the mobile world can buy a set of required system-on-chips for gsm/3G/bluetooth/camera functionality and anything beyond, and start making mobile phones. While things did work when each cellphone maker had their own OS it was quite a limitation, and very analogous to the 80's home computer market.

In the 80's, you could buy different Commodore, Atari, Apple, PC, Acorn, Sinclair, and probably a few dozen other niche home computers and none of them worked together. Finally, in the late 80's the PC platform with all their dozens of IBM PC clones won over everyone else, even most of Apple. Soon everyone found themselves having landed on the same commodity hardware and they figured that they'll make more money if they just use the same OS than everyone else, rather than a custom OS that would just cut them off the big market. Hence, Windows bloomed, everyone sold it, and soon it didn't matter which computer you bought because you ended up using Windows on it. Differences between PC makers become differences in brands.

The same is happening in mobile phones, err, I mean mobile computers. Because everyone (relatively speaking) can do the hardware, companies can now afford to, and must, focus on the software.

I hereby foresee that in a few years we're down to Android and iPhone and "the rest". Unless Apple begins to target the low end, Android will become the clearly largest mobile phone platform in the world. iPhone will compete in the high end against Android but the relation between Android and iPhone OS are likely to parallel the way Microsoft and Apple relate to each other in the desktop market.

That is, unless unforeseen disruptions arise and completely throw the market upside down, Android will grow to have 40-50% market share, Apple up to 20-30%, and the rest will be 5-15% Symbian, Windows Phone, and many others combined.