News from the Symbian Partner Event: AT&T “moving to single phone OS?” Bet not.

It always amuses me how technical news can be oversimplified to the point of absurdity. PCWorld had the headline AT&T Hopes for Single Phone OS. Of course this is probably sillier than hoping for world peace or a repeal of death and taxes. And AT&T is probably the most diverse carrier in the US for smartphone operating systems and will most likely remain that way for some time.

We’re actually big AT&T fans, visiting our local store weekly and buying cool new smartphone devices. So we’re interested in this topic in a visceral way and we listened to Roger Smith’s talk pretty closely. What Roger actually said was that Java for their branded phones was pretty much a failure (I couldn’t agree more) and that they hoped that their own branded phones could move to one OS. He hinted that maybe that would be Symbian. So here’s our predictions on the topic:
* one year from now your local AT&T store will carry the five major smartphone operating systems (which happen to the be ones we support)
* their branded phones will still include Windows Mobile and they will NOT have moved to only Symbian branded phones