Speculations about Mobile OSes.

Here we get a preview on the look of the new Symbian^3 (and Symbian^4 is already ongoing).

The iPhone has 15% market share, Symbian has about 40% but it is decreasing.

It is true that Nokia took 4 long years to understand why it was loosing marker shares, but today it looks like the european phone-maker is moving toward making the gap in UI-design from competitor's phone slimmer.

Now I get curious: suppose Symbian phones reach GUI feature/beautifulness parity with competitors, will they also be cheaper because of Symbian's low footprint on resources usage?

Will Symbian phones be lighter and have longer lasting batteries? Will Qt make them more easy/profitable to develop?

Suppose the answer to the above question is "yes", will Apple and Google be forced to develop even better GUIs exploiting new interaction design concepts and ideas in order to keep growing on the market? What beautiful interfaces will Nokia's competitor develop if Symbian^3 (and ^4) manages to keep up to par with todays iPhone and Android?

This mobile evolution is getting me very curious: since I was born I've never seen so many operating systems fight on the same market... It is wonderfully interesting and it feels so good to know that all of this is possible because of the growth of the Free Software movement :-)