Barcelona: Software developers for smartphones have been put centre of stage at this week's Mobile World Congress industry fair in Barcelona after Nokia's decision to adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
Following are the runners in what Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop said is now a three-horse race:
Google's increasingly popular Android operating system controlled 23 per cent of the smartphone market last year, second only to Nokia's Symbian, according to research firm Gartner.
Korea's Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, late-comers to the smartphone market, have successfully adopted Android as their key platform, while it is also used by Taiwan's HTC, Sony Ericsson and Motorola Mobility.
The open-source nature of the software, making it easy to modify, has boosted its take-up among hardware vendors.
Consumers are attracted by the easy access to Google's services they already use on desktop, and Google itself sees it as the key platform for its future as Internet usage is becoming increasingly wireless.
There are more than 100,000 applications - apps - available on the Android Market.
Google's potential problems include the diversification of the open-source platform - there are already many versions of it on the market, causing a headache for developers. The platform's success is also worrying some operators who are hoping to sell apps and benefit from their clients increased use of mobile phones.
Apple
Just a year after surprising the mobile industry with the iPhone, Apple rolled out its App Store in 2008 - creating the market for small mobile software application programmes.
Apple was last year's fourth-largest platform, with just shy of a 16 per cent market share, but due to its largest store and wide appeal among developers is clearly one of the top three players in the new smartphone battle.
Some 90 per cent of all app downloads are made on Apple's platform and its total downloads topped 10 billion last month.
The more than 300,000 applications on App Store are a major strength in Apple's offering, but at the same time they are also creating a major problem for the developers who are battling for visibility the crowd.
Microsoft
A very distant challenger before the Nokia deal. Microsoft has tried to conquer the mobile market for years without success and held just 4 per cent market shares last year.
Its Windows mobile operating system used to be the second most popular for smartphones after Symbian but has been overtaken by Apple and Research in Motion.
There are around 8,000 applications available from Windows Marketplace.
Most top phone hardware manufacturers except Apple and RIM support Windows, but most of them have only a few Microsoft phones in their offering.
The software has got positive reviews from industry experts and media, but so far its consumer appeal has been limited.
Symbian, RIM, bada, webOS, etc
Nokia's Symbian, which dominated the smartphone market for a decade, still had 38 per cent of the market last year, but the Finnish firm will wind down the production of new Symbian-operated models over this year and next.
Due to cumbersome development tools and a long process for getting software to Nokia's stores it never attracted many application developers.
Blackberry-maker Research In Motion controlled 16 per cent of the market last year. It has the widest number of registered developers, but this stems from internal corporate IT departments which have created company-specific software. Its appeal beyond corporate messaging and email is still limited in many parts of the world.
Samsung opened up its internal bada platform around one year ago, and sold some 10 million bada phones last year, almost on a par with Microsoft's total sales.
Hewlett-Packard acquired operating system webOS through its Palm acquisition last year. It unveiled two smartphones and a tablet earlier this month.
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