With smartphones successfully commandeering the spotlight from their less capable predecessors this year, AT&T has decided to get serious about bringing some standards to the market. Competition is heating up, and consumers are demanding more powerful phones with capabilities that extend far beyond the box they ship in. To help fill demand, AT&T is planning to to standardize low-end devices on a single mobile OS and roll out a line of branded smartphones.

AT&T believes that smartphones will become the majority of devices that connect to its network by 2014, and it's probably right. The smartphone market is seeing strong growth (though slightly slower this quarter), thanks to new efforts like Google's Android OS and renewed competition from BlackBerry maker RIM. Apple's $200 and $300 iPhones have seen remarkable success, too, recently knocking Motorola's RAZR from its perch as the best-selling phone in the US (despite the RAZR's long-time status as a "free-with-contract" phone). But to avoid running smartphones aground in the same barren, incompatible development landscape that the current dumbphone is stifled by, AT&T wants to gets its OS ducks in a row.

Speaking at the Symbian Partner Event in San Francisco, Roger Smith, director of next generation services, data product realization at AT&T, told an audience that Symbian is "a very credible and likely candidate" for a new line of AT&T-branded smartphones, according to Yahoo News. While AT&T has every intention of carrying the same smartphones like BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices it does now, the company wants to simplify its support structure while simultaneously offering devices powered by more standardized and extensible platforms.

Seth Bloom, an AT&T spokesperson, confirmed to Ars Technica that the company "has no plans to standardize on one platform for our smart devices. But we have said that we see potential benefit in standardizing our low-end devices on a single mobile OS, though we have not finalized our plans to do so."

AT&T's announcement is perfectly timed, due to Nokia's finalized acquisition of the Symbian platform. Symbian has been used for some time on a variety of popular international phones, including Nokia's own S60 line and phones from Sony Ericsson. With this acquisition of the entire platform, though, Nokia plans to open source Symbian, making it a much more service-agnostic choice for AT&T versus Android, Google's open source mobile phone OS. Android had developmental help from a variety of hardware manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, and LG, and already offers advanced functionality like the application marketplace. But Google's OS has been criticized by some carriers and manufacturers as being too Google-centric, tying too closely into services like Gmail and Google contact syncing.

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Nokia eyes wider use of Linux software in phones

BARCELONA (Reuters) - The world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia, could start to use open-source Linux software on its more expensive phone models, a senior company official said on Tuesday.

"In the longer perspective, Linux will become a serious alternative for our high-end phones," Ukko Lappalainen, vice president at Nokia's markets unit, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the "Nokia World" industry conference.

Linux's role in the handset industry is growing as Google has introduced its Linux-based Android platform, but Lappalainen said Nokia was likely to stick to its own Linux development.

Nokia uses Linux maemo software in its niche offering of Internet tablets, while it uses Symbian software for its phones.

"I don't see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo," Lappalainen said. (Reporting by Tarmo Virki)

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Nokia World 2008 is taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain and the event kicked off with the keynote announcing the Nokia N97 multimedia computer. The Nokia N97 brings a QWERTY keyboard and touch screen to the Nseries or you could say it brings a phone and S60 to the Nokia Internet Tablet. The Nokia promotional materials state, "Desktop.Laptop.Pocket" as they bring you a device with a 3.5 inch touch screen display (640×360 pixels resolution) that slides up and at an angle (similar to the AT&T Tilt) to reveal a full 3-row QWERTY keyboard and directional pad. I was expecting to see S60 touch launch on a Nseries rather than the Nokia 5800 we saw last month.