OSNews

Take PalmOS/Symbian/WinCE and make them multitasking, give them full os functionality like linux has such as multimedia playback/capture, and the memory requirements are the same as linux, if not more.

Symbian has been fully multitasking for years. Version 6 on the Nokia 9210 ran inside 8MB RAM and on a 50Mhz proc. It was also able to playback music/video etc on a system of that spec. The latest incarnation in the 9500 has a 150Mhz CPU and 64MB RAM, though the OS uses little more resources than it used to. So far competing Windoze and Linux systems currently need much faster and more powerhungry hardware. Which makes it slightly obvious why all the major phone companies are shareholders in Symbian and support/churn out loads of phones running the OS. It's just much better suited to mobile devices.

I'll agree the notion of Linux on a phone has stumbled off the blocks, but we are in an area where people on average don't realise there is any kind of OS as they see Windoze. At the moment at least 53% of mobile devices (smartphones/PDAs/etc) sold run Symbian OS, based on information from Canalys here: http://www.canalys.com/pr/2005/r2005012.htm

Finding details of the just the phone sector seems harder, but with most of Microsoft's main market being the PocketPC rather than phones it's likely to push the Symbian dominance up toward 70-80% of the market. Showing that Microsoft are very far from taking over this area as the first article suggests, especially when reports show Symbian's market share growing quarter after quarter.

Short of a major phone manufacterer grabbing a Linux distro and cramming it into a phone, then getting other manufacterers to take it on board, the market is likely to remain dominated by Symbian. All the major players are on board, the OS is light, stable, easy to use and most of all you are truely mobile with a device where the battery won't go flat if you use it as an MP3 player all day, interspersed with web-browsing, calling, texting, emailing, etc etc etc throughout your day.