Clearly iPhone and Android will continue to duke it out for the top, but the #3 position is going to be an interesting battle to watch. Will it be RIM, HP/Palm, or Win 7 Phone?

Just looking at market share, particularly among firms with slow-changing IT departments, you really have to give the advantage to RIM in the #3 position. On the flip side, that advantage is a fleeting thing, since it's all about firms that want to connect to their Exchange servers. Win 7 phones would seem like a natural challenger in that ecosystem, if not exactly right now but certainly as the Microsoft team continues developing it.

I don't see how HP/Palm is supposed to get a toe-hold.

As to Nokia's position in this world, I don't entirely get it. HTC, Samsung, even Motorola make sense. They want to build awesome hardware and run whatever software that people want. Nokia seems to want to position itself differently from that. We'll see how it works for them.

Flashback / deja vu: discussing the #3 smartphone operating system wars sounds not entirely unlike discussing the #3 PC wars of the mid-late 1980's. Amiga vs. Atari ST. That wasn't exactly a good outcome for either one.