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It's a reasonable question, but in some ways I don't think Blackberry warrants a direct comparison to the others. Blackberries are almost a de facto standard-issue PDA in many organizations; these decisions are being driven by the organizations for various reasons, including manageability and security. RIM's dominance there is not necessarily being driven by actual user demand.

It would be more interesting to see some statistics on Blackberry usage in terms of BES vs BIS. I would suspect that users with BIS are more likely representative of consumers that have purchased the phone based on personal preference, where BES users are probably just using the phone that was given to them by their employer.

I think the other relevant thing is that, whereas Blackberry and Symbian devices were smart phones that people *could* extend by installing third-party apps, Apple became the smart phone that people *did* extend by installing third-party apps, because frankly it was made both easy and desirable. Palm and Google are following this route.

I have no hard data to back this up, it's pure speculation, but I suspect that when looking at the "first generation" of smart phones, whether Palm, WinMob, RIM or Symbian, the number of users that actually sought out and installed third-party apps was probably a niche within the overall user base. I've known many people with Blackberries or Nokia smart phones, but I'm the only one I know that ever went to the trouble to use something beyond the default app set.

Now, even my mother downloads farting apps on her iphone. For that reason, I would say that Apple jumped the chasm in the smart phone market by making that technology easily accessible. None of the smart phone platforms prior to that really seized that opportunity, with the possible exception of Palm.

Apple, Palm and Google now represent the direction that smart phone platforms are heading, which is why they attract all the attention. They're driving sales at the consumer level and turning wireless data connectivity from a luxury feature to a commodity standard.

RIM and Nokia have the most to lose, but they also have the experience and expertise, so they shouldn't be discounted. They just don't have anything very sexy to talk about right now, and the media likes bling.

As for Microsoft, their performance to date in the mobile space represents somewhat of an epic failure. Their enterprise dominance alone should have given them a stronger footing to challenge RIM. I suspect their biggest failing was simply treating the PDA (and subsequent smart phones) as an extension of the desktop, rather than a platform in its own right.

The lines are blurring, now, so things are getting interesting. RIM is pushing hard for consumer market share, Apple is finding their way into enterprises. Our own company started permitting them once the bean counters realized how much cheaper it was to allow us to use our own personal phones rather than pay for Blackberries and the susequent backend licensing and support.

I guess this is my roundabout way of saying that I don't think anyone is really ignoring RIM or Symbian, just that there isn't anything to report right now...