Samsung Electronics may become a surprise factor in the battle for
dominance of the smartphone software market, Lowell McAdam, chief
executive of Verizon Communications, said on Friday.
Google Inc's Android and Apple Inc's iOS operating systems currently dominate the smartphone market.
But
Verizon Wireless, the mobile venture of Verizon, has made no secret of
the fact it wants to see a strong third competitor. The biggest U.S.
mobile operator has already said it will sell phones based on Microsoft
Corp's Windows Phone 8 software later this year to support a third
system.
Another contender, Research In Motion, has fallen on hard
times and will miss out on 2012 holiday sales as it has delayed its next
BlackBerry system until next year. Verizon has also said it wants to
sell the next BlackBerry phones when they are ready in early 2013.
Verizon's
McAdam said it was too soon to count RIM out of the game and that it
was not yet clear which system will win third place going forward.
McAdam
said he also expects competition from Samsung, which focuses mostly on
selling phones using the Android operating system, after it was recently
dealt a bruising defeat in Apple's patent infringement court case
against it in California.
"The dark horse here might be Samsung,"
McAdam said during a webcast of an investor call. "They've got the
capability to go out on their own to do their own operating system.
They've tinkered with it."
Samsung has developed a mobile
operating system called Bada, which it uses for lower-end devices. It
uses Android software for its top of the range devices.
However, Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder was skeptical Samsung has a strong Android/iOS rival in the works.
"What (McAdam is) trying to do is stoke the competition," Snyder said.
Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012