Perhaps the time is right for Symbian to start aggressively marketing its wares down a market segment, as the mobile platform developer said it would when announcing a 3G reference design for the mid-tier market yesterday; because the tide is slowly turning against the it, according to a new report by The Diffusion Group. The research firm predicts the battle between mobile OS vendors will intensify with market-leader Symbian gradually losing share to both Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Linux.

The Diffusion Group finds that at the end of last year Symbian enjoyed a market share of 51 percent, followed by Linux (23 percent) and Microsoft's mobile platforms (17 percent). Linux experienced a sizeable boost in shipments during the second half of the year; something few forecasters predicted, but The Diffusion Group expects to continue.

By the end of 2010, Symbian will fall behind both Microsoft and Linux. Its share declining to approximately 22 percent, with Windows at 29 percent and Linux holding 26 percent. The Diffusion Group lead mobile analyst Lee Allen says, "Symbian will maintain leading share through 2009, but 2007 will see the beginning of Symbian's decline in share as the combined market penetration of Windows, Linux, and native Java begin to erode developer and vendor support for Symbian."

Familiarity with the Windows platform— from the desktop to the handheld to the handset—is finally paying off for Microsoft and its mobile OSs, with both prosumers and the enterprise. Key factors for the eventual winner of the mobile wars include the level of integration with other platforms and the ease of application development. Interestingly, The Diffusion Group says a beneficiary of this battle will be various forms of Java, which runs across the different mobile device operating systems.

The emerging Chinese market and worldwide migration of users to more powerful devices, as more sophisticated applications and seamless mobility are offered by operators, is a couple of reasons we'll see such a huge growth in smartphones over the next couple of years.

Analyst firm In-Stat reported in January that 31.5 million smartphones sold last year, up from 18 million the year before. By 2009, In-Stat predicts that number should grow to 115 million.