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The three main players, Symbian, PalmSource and Microsoft have different approaches to naming their operating systems.

Symbian, whose operating system variants are all for connected devices but for different levels of capability, has nicely hardware-independent naming: UIQ, Series 60, Series 80, Series 90, Series 40, and should the company wish, there is a convention in the naming which can be extended into the future. PalmSource has added a connected variant to its unconnected staple and differentiates the two by both names and numbers: Garnet is the unconnected OS5, while Cobalt is the connected OS6. Again the naming is agnostic about hardware.

For Microsoft the situation is different. It currently has separately named operating system variants for smartphones and PDAs, with the latter dividing into connected devices that can accommodate SIM cards, and unconnected ones that can’t. They are differentiated by names which imply device types: Windows Mobile for Smartphone, Windows Mobile for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile for Pocket PC Phone Edition.

Much of the core software behind the operating systems for smartphones and Pocket PCs is shared, and this is likely to continue to be the case, so Microsoft has the need to be able to tweak its operating system covered. What the company should examine is its naming system, because currently its prescriptive nature could be construed as hampering device development.

The first device that makes Microsoft’s Pocket PC/Smartphone division feel like a handicap is Motorla’s MPx.

The MPx runs what we currently know as Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition, Second Edition. So it provides software such as Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. It has a touch sensitive screen and built-in handwriting recognition. This allows for pretty high level functionality like that available in Pocket PCs.

Yet the MPx is not a Pocket PC: It is as much a phone as it is a PDA. The hardware is ‘dual format’ with a mechanically switched lid, which can flip open both like a clamshell mobile phone, or Nokia Communicator. Choose the former and you have a portrait oriented screen and keypad area with phone-like characteristics, choose the latter and you have a landscape oriented screen and a tiny qwerty keypad. The MPx is a true hybrid.

I fully expect we’ll see more hybrids like the MPx push at the edges of what a mobile device can offer. How about phone sized devices with touch screens, and/or WiFi, and/or internal memory measured in GigaBytes for starters? Or SIMless PDA-like devices that marry the features of increasingly popular mobile media devices with what we today think of as unconnected PDAs?

I don’t think the PDA is dead, just evolving along with a range of other device types. And what really interests me isn’t the future of one category of mobile device, but how operating system providers are going to deal with the increasing range of functions and device types that could emerge over the next three to five years.

It’s digging a hole for yourself to try and second guess where technology development will go in that time frame, but I’ll stick my neck out on one thing, and say that operating system names which incorporate device types should become a thing of the past.

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