Von Tetzchner is also in the cellphone business for the long haul, as is Symbian. Von Tetzchner doesn't believe that Symbian has to become the dominant operating system in cellphones for his firm to find success, but he does think Microsoft, which would ship its browser with its OS, should not become dominant. There's no reason anyone has to own the market, he says -- lots of different companies, Microsoft and Symbian among them, could share the wealth. "With any product in the world, you have choice," he says. "All these cellphones here are from different makers. Why should software be an all-or-nothing market?"

But does Microsoft want an all-or-nothing market? In many of its public comments on smart phones, the company has said that it believes deeply in customization. At the same time, however, it has heavily pushed the Windows brand on all of its Pocket devices -- you can already see this in the uniform look and feel across all of its PocketPC PDAs and in the marketing for those devices. Its competitors, and its potential allies, in these mobile markets don't know what to make of this, which is understandable: "Nokia is one of the strongest brands in the world," von Tetzchner says, summing up the phone makers' worries regarding Windows. "Why would they want Microsoft on their devices?"

So far, only in Japan has the "mobile Internet" done well. Even though that country, with its relatively low desktop-PC ownership, is something of a special circumstance, the cellphone industry is eager to replicate the Japanese market for Internet cellphones around the world -- and if such phones do become the standard in cellphones, handset firms like Nokia would hate for Windows to be the thing customers look for when they go to make a purchase..

In May, during a speech at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, Calif., Juha Christensen, Microsoft's corporate vice president of mobility, seemed to try to allay the fears of phone makers. Microsoft, he said, is very "interested" in the diversity of hardware in the phone market.

"You know, if you walk into a mobile-phone store today you'll see anywhere between a hundred and two hundred different phones on the shelf," Christensen said. "There is something for everyone -- small, round, light, metal case, whatever. And we see this very much being the case in these types of [smart] devices as well."

Christensen, who co-founded Symbian before he went to Microsoft, also acknowledged that the phone business is "a very fashion-driven market." On a recent trip to China, he said, he saw people who have "started putting diamonds on the front plates of phones, and some people even use them when they propose to their girlfriend to marry them -- they give her a phone with a diamond on it as opposed to a ring, so this kind of can show you how far it can go if it goes to the extreme here."

And then Christensen added something that would seem very un-Microsoftian: "As a matter of fact a prediction that I often make is that three years from now you will not find two mobile devices on the planet that are configured the same way. It's not just the hardware that's very, very personal; it's the skin that you put on the front page. It's the applications you have on it. It's the services you subscribe to. It's your ring tone. Every device will be different and we'll see there are so many permutations out there that very, very easily every device on the planet is going to be differentiated and is going to look different."

In the world of desktop computers, one of the historic points of contention between Microsoft and computer makers has been over the manufacturers' freedom to alter copies of Windows they ship on their machines. Manufacturers have fought with Microsoft over every conceivable thing that goes into the computers they sell -- over what applications and competing OSes they can ship with the machines, over the icons they add to the desktop, over the Internet service providers that can be added to what Microsoft calls Windows' "out-of-box experience." So it's surprising to hear a Microsoft executive saying that he envisions no such fights in the world of mobile hardware -- and it's hard to believe.

"We tell people in this industry, 'Go to computer makers and ask them how happy they are to deal with Microsoft,'" says Opera's von Tetzchner. Microsoft may be telling the phone carriers that it will be open to customization, but they need only look at its record to judge it, he adds. "And if they do look at the record, they would have to be rather stupid to get with Microsoft."

It's not at all clear what Microsoft means when it says it's open to customization. Will it require phone makers to keep the Windows look and feel on their phones? Will it require that Microsoft smart phones be sold and marketed as "Windows powered"?

When asked about phone makers' freedom to alter Windows in smart phones, Microsoft's Suwanjindar pointed to the Orange SPV phone as "a great example of how an operator can brand the entire experience. In this case Orange has branded the home screen, the dialer, many of the applications as well as the actual handset."

He's right about that -- but the phone is still unmistakably a Windows phone. You just need to look at a couple of screenshots for proof. There are the familiar Windows icons and Windows software. When you need to chat with someone, you load up MSN Messenger. When the phone is busy, the Windows hourglass icon pops up.

In fact, familiarity is one of Microsoft's key selling points. "If you have used Microsoft Windows before, then you will be very familiar with the new Smartphone 2002," reads the ad copy on Microsoft's smart-phone page. "You will recognize the interface and programs, and the Smartphone extends the reach of the PC experience by allowing you to access the same applications, information and services and use the same profiles and login accounts you have set up on your home or work PC."

And familiarity is not a bad thing, says Suwanjindar. "We are hearing from customers (end users and operators) that the Windows brand is very valuable," he wrote. Consumers are "comfortable with the Windows technology, thus customers can easily adapt to the Smartphone technology. That is an advantage. As far as having phones that look similar based on the same OS, all our partners have room to differentiate and add value to their respective products."

Is it so bad -- from a phone maker's point of view, as well as from a phone buyer's -- to have a Windows phone? Like much else in the phone business, that seems to be more of a marketing question than a technology question. "Quite frankly, all these phones do the same sort of the thing, don't they?" Zoller, of Ovum, says. "The actual basic underpinnings are similar -- so if you're a phone maker, one way to make yourself different is branding, and Symbian's model offers more freedom for that."

Zoller's point is crucial. She isn't saying that Microsoft's phones are any less customizable, from a user's perspective, than any other company's phones. Microsoft says that its operating system will work on a number of different phones from a number of different manufacturers; and it says that users will be able to change the aesthetics of the OS to suit their mood, as you can do in Windows desktops; and it says that developers will be free to create programs for the system and that users can run any program they like. And the company may be right on all of those points, and yet still not be customizable enough -- or at least customizable in the way that would matter most to the big phone makers: Letting them replace the Windows logo with logos of their own.

Consequently, what could happen in the phone business, analysts say, is that small phone makers that don't have a strong brand will decide that hitching on to Microsoft is the best thing for them. The big companies will use Symbian's system, which allows them the freedom to build an interface more in tune with their brand. And we could end up with a split market, with Microsoft likely owning the smaller share.

Getting the smaller share of a split market is probably not what Microsoft was looking for when it got into the phone business, so -- unless it drops out of the business completely, which is unlikely -- it's probably not going to take such an outcome well. And the people who compete with Microsoft, like Opera's von Tetzchner, know that the company, by virtue of its deep pockets, can always pull something out of a hat when its fortunes dim. If Microsoft manages to coerce one of the large cellphone companies to use its system, for example, it could become a formidable competitor.

"No," von Tetzchner says pragmatically, "I don't believe that the best technology always wins."

But at the same time, he says, there's something about Microsoft's power that he kind of enjoys: It helps in sales meetings. "We're the kind of company that people look at and say, 'You're competing with Microsoft and you're surviving. You must be doing something right.' People are afraid of Microsoft. And in our dealings, we've found that as long as we provide a solution that's at least as good as Microsoft's, people are OK with it."

In other words, one of Opera's main selling points is that it's not Microsoft. "Usually we don't even have to remind them of that," von Tetzchner says.

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