Windows Phone

In what can't be deemed a surprise, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week announced the company will take a $7. 6 billion write-down on its $9.4 billion investment (81% of the initial value) in Nokia and will be laying off some 7,800 workers. While industry analysts estimate that over 90% of the Windows Phone devices that have been sold carry the Nokia (now "Microsoft") label, clearly former CEO Steve Ballmer's plan to emulate Apple's strategy of controlling both the mobile device hardware and software could not save Microsoft's Quixotic vision for Windows Phone. To his credit, Mr.

This year's third quarter sees the Android operating system steadily making strides as it accounts for 81 percent of total smartphone shipments or 211.6 million smartphone units, while Apple's iPhone drops from a year-ago 14.4 percent to this quarter's 12.9 percent, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

Research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts that this year, the smartphone market will grow by 40 percent over 2012 and will ship 1.7 billion handset units annually by 2017. Total sales of mobile phones - over half of which are smartphones - will reach 1.8 billion units through 2013, according to IDC.

According to the Microsoft CFO and CMO of Windows, Tami Reller, Microsoft is beginning to make a strong move back into the global smartphone market, which is currently being dominated by Google Android and Apple. Reller said: "We are now officially the third [mobile] ecosystem."

According to IDC figures released in May, in Q1 of this year, Microsoft took third place from Blackberry in global smartphone market shipments, by a margin of 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent.

With the Mobile World Congress (MWC) wrapping up in Barcelona and the ongoing torrent of mobile announcements we see on a regular basis, I've seen a number of interesting things pass by over the past few weeks. MWC is always the big annual event in the mobile world, but a lot of the buzz in the field has shifted to devices, and on that front, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is stealing a lot of the thunder from MWC. So there were some important announcements, but more were geared to the operator environment than to consumers.

There's been some indications that mobile is slowing. There were few smartphone announcements at CES, and now Apple stock is down largely because iPhone demand appears to be slowing. Microsoft has not seen the sales it expected on its Windows Phone or new Surface tablet. Surface sales are estimated at about half of what Microsoft was expecting.

One might be tempted to ask: Is the mobile party over?

Well, 2012 has been another tumultuous year in the mobility market, but more than anything else it has set the table for what should be a number of major developments in 2013. Along with Apple and Google, Samsung and Amazon have become major players in the mobile device market, and we expect the fates of some of the more "challenged" players like RIM and Nokia will become clear as the year unfolds. So, baseball fans, it's time to fill out your scorecard and get ready for the game to begin.

According to new research from Analysys Mason, although Windows Phone is set to become the fastest growing OS in the next five years, it will only secure nine percent of the smartphone market share in 2017.