Windows Mobile losing steam too fast?

Looking at the United States cellular market alone raises an interesting question. Where is Windows Mobile?

All of the high profile smartphones being touted by the major carriers in the USA these days are running an OS other than Windows Mobile.

Sprint has the Palm Pre as their new highly anticipated phone coming soon, but not many are paying attention to the fact that the Palm Treo Pro was recently released on Sprint. To add insult to injury, the Palm Pre has all but knocked the wind out of the sails of the HTC Touch Pro that is also on Sprints network. All eyes are now focused on the Pre as everyone want to see more and there are already some that want to buy it now.

Keeping with the CDMA trend, let's take a look at Verizon Wireless. Their current smartphone of choice is the Blackberry Storm. Despite many issues on release and backlash from die hard BlackBerry users who swear by QWERTY keyboards, the Storm is still touted as their flagship phone.

While RIM and Palm are familiar faces in the smartphone world for a long time now, two new comers(relatively speaking) are on the flagship devices for the USA's top GSM carriers.

AT&T has Apple's Iphone 3G as their current flagship smartphone. It is widely known that this phone sells very well for the carrier. It is the Iphone 3G's popularity that has been the blame, on a few accounts, for AT&T's network troubles lately. Whether that is actually the case is still not known, but is is very unlikely that AT&T will be featuring anything other than an Iphone as the top of the line device for their network anytime soon.

T-Mobile USA has the newest of the smartphone platforms on their network right now and that is the Google Android OS powered T-Mobile G1. The G1 has sold well for T-Mobile despite some harsh criticisms on the hardware. Now there is talk of a T-Mobile G2(aka HTC Magic) being released on the network soon.

Looking at the unlocked phone market Sony Ericsson and Nokia are the two most popular in the US in that category due to their Sony Style and Nokia Flagship stores respectively. The top tier phone for Nokia is the N96 at the moment which run Symbian OS S60 3rd edition and their highly anticipated N97 will be running Symbian OS S60 5th edition. None of this is a surprise since Symbian is controlled by Nokia at this point. Sony Ericsson at the moment has a Windows Mobile device as its flagship smartphone, the Xperia X1a/i. This is a change since for a long time Sony Ericsson has Symbian UIQ running on its smartphones. This change is short lived however as Sony Ericsson has announced their next high end device, the Idou. This device is running an Symbian OS variant showing that Sony Ericsson has no commitments to producing Windows Mobile devices as their high-end.

Where does this leave Windows Mobile?
Well believe it or not, despite all that was said above, they are still in a very strong position. They just do not have the media attention that all of the other devices are getting. The reason Windows Mobile is still doing so well is do to the amount of devices being released with Windows Mobile on it. Every carrier mentioned above has a Windows Mobile device to their name and some have more than one. These devices are more often than not in better price segments which allow them to sell more.
Also, corporate America tend to lean towards only two device types for their use. That is either a RIM Blackberry or a Microsoft Windows Mobile device which leaves all of the other high profile devices to consumer space only.
All Windows Mobile would need to end up in the spot light again is a new revision of the OS that is eye catching and easy to use on a device that is powerfull and well designed.