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Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.

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Dag nabbit I had hoped to get away without having to write a predictions column this year, but no such luck. Look for that one tomorrow. Tonight, of course, there’s Google’s Nexus One smart phone to write about. Is it an iPhone killer? Hardly. And that’s not even the point.

Google’s Nexus One is a very nice smart phone as far as I can tell. I only read what you read and I haven’t yet played with one, but a couple nice folks who were on TWiT with me this week have tried it and liked it a lot, especially the screen. Yet many of the stories I’ve read today have presented this product introduction as a seminal break between Apple and Google with one trying to kill the other. Not even close.

Apple is very happy with its iPhone sales, thanks, and those are unlikely to be hurt much, if at all, by the Nexus One. Not that the Nexus One can’t be a huge success for Google. But here are the points everyone seems to be missing: 1) there is plenty of room in the mobile market for both Apple and Google, and; 2) this product introduction really marks the ultimate decline and fall of so-called “feature phones” and the rise to dominance of smart phones. Within two years there will be no more feature phones, at least not in the U.S.

The real losers today, then, are makers of feature phones and, maybe, Microsoft, which has the most vulnerable smart phone platform in Windows Phone.

The Nexus One introduction, coming on top of the iPhone, marks the true ascendence of smart phones as an alternative platform to desktops and notebooks. No, you can’t survive on a smart phone alone, the days of one computing device per person ended long ago.

But this does mark the beginning of the smart phone shakeout, when the industry matures and inevitably drops to no more than three viably competitive smart phone platforms. So just as you have Windows, Mac, and some form of ‘nix fighting it out for desktops and notebooks, so too we’ll shortly have three major mobile platforms to choose from.

iPhone and Android will be here for the long haul with the question being which of Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry will die?

What’s your guess? My guess is that Blackberry will be the third standard, Nokia will eventually leave Symbian for Android, and Microsoft will buy Palm but then screw it up, losing its position almost entirely in the mobile client space where smart phones will soon dominate, selling up to a billion units per year.

Hey this did turn out to be a predictions column after all!

More predictions tomorrow.

A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic.  I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995.  I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines.  Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it.  Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.

Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.

I had intended to write a post about Google’s Chrome Operating System, but then the New York Times called looking for an Op-Ed piece on exactly that so I gave it to them.  Look for the column to appear Monday and I’ll put a link to it here.

The Times column is here.

Beyond the broader implications of the Chrome OS, one reader asks about the strategic involvement of Adobe Systems in the project, since Adobe is in the short list of companies mentioned in the Chrome OS FAQ.  Why is Adobe on this list, asks the reader, and is Google likely to buy Adobe?

I have no inside information here, just the usual informed guesswork.  The logical acquirer for Adobe, if the company is to ever be acquired, is still Apple, which would gain some real synergies in its entertainment endeavors as well as some needed technical depth.

What Google needs from Adobe is primarily Flash video.  Remember that YouTube made Flash video a factor in the streaming market and Google now owns YouTube.  Remember, too, that Apple’s iPhone has specifically shunned Flash, somewhat to its detriment.  Apple’s reasoning — that Flash takes too much horsepower for smart phones — no longer really stands with the iPhone 3GS shipping.  So Google’s embrace of Flash video for the Chrome OS AND Android helps YouTube while differentiating both products from Apple.

But does Google also need Adobe’s Flex and AIR platforms?  That is less clear.  Both Flex and AIR are runtime environments for cross-platform applications (Open Source applications in the case of Flex). Knowing a bit about how Google thinks, it is very possible that Flex and AIR will be seen as too heavy and — more importantly — too non-Google.  So we might see Flex but not AIR, for example.  I simply don’t know.

But I seriously doubt that Google will be buying Adobe or, for that matter, making ANY huge acquisitions in the months ahead.