If you follow the mobile market, then you know that there are essentially 4 operating systems that are really making wavies. The two oldest are the Blackberry, which is closed source and private, and Symbian, which was recently purchased by Nokia and made open source and free. Both of these systems are rather old school. Their basic code was written before the days of social networking and user generated content. The last two are the newest, the Apple iPhone, which is closed and private, and Google’s Android, which is open source and free. Both of these two systems were freshly created with the newest Internet applications in mind.

There are lots of other programming languages for mobile devices that you just don’t hear much about anymore. Sometimes you hear about the open source effort of Linmo, a kind of open source Linux for smartphones, mentioned in the same sentence as the Google Android, which borrowed heavily from it. But without a big company and an even bigger marketing effort, it is unlikely that it will be able to compete with other free, solid operating systems. The other big loser is Java for mobile phones, also called J2ME. It has dropped in importance so much that Handango, a top distributor of mobile applications, will not even distribute free J2ME applications anymore. Ouch!

Nokia is adding to its interesting mobile content biz plays. They have seen the future of handsets, and they know that they are a player but a more and more marginalized one. The real attention goes to Apple, Google and other Internet masters.

But Nokia is able to bankroll a second career as a mobile content player. They have bought Navteq and Symbian. The latest move is buying mobile messaging company, Oz. They are also on the lookout for new investments like their latest in Zvents. This new career of theirs is very bold. It will be great to watch how it goes. If anyone can do it, it is Nokia. After all, they made most of the phones that these new mobile services will need to run on.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend this weekend. It centered around the travel content space, specifically the mobile travel content space. His take was that there were too many big companies already in the space, and it would be very difficult for small players to break through.

I admit that I was surprised by his argument. The travel content space is crowded, but new competitors are finding their voice. For example. Frommer and Fodors have to contend with Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet has to contend with Trip Adviser. While Trip Adviser is gathering up user generated content and reviews, it has to contend with Yelp. And of course there is still Travel Channel with its global television reach in contrast to the wikitravel.org, the travel wiki that is starting to go back to the killing trees route by taking their content from the web to these collections of paper called “books”. And this is just the good old fashion Internet.

The picture on mobile is a free-for-all with everyone trying to figure out how to present their info in the best way possible.

The best example of how much the mobile arena is undeveloped is the recent results on mobile search, an area increasingly dominated by Google on the web but with space for others in mobile. For example, the little startup, Cha-Cha, which released their search service 7 months ago has over 200,000 users, making them number 4 in SMS search. Of course, Google is number 1 with over 10x the traffic at 2.7 million users. But Yahoo is only around 800,000 and Cha-Cha is getting close quickly. The idea that a little search company could match Google is practically unthinkable on the Internet but is very doable on the Mobile Web.

In a related piece about how the mobile arena is bringing unexpected competition, keep your eyes on Nokia. With their buying spree of mapping companies and their knowledge of the mobile phones (since they built most of them), they have a real advantage over the competition like Google that is trying to create their own mobile phone software.

Some days it is tough to be the big guy.

Nokia has reported two bits of bad news. The first was that it was predicting a weaker than expected Q3. This loss of revenues is due to price squeezing from its low-end competitors. Nokia has decided to take the high road, literally. They don’t plan to reduce prices to compete.

The second bit of bad news comes from Nokia’s high end market. O2 has decided not to offer Nokia’s latest smartphone, the N96, to their customers. O2’s problem is that they don’t want to divert their money from their subsidy deal with Apple for the iPhone. O2 is way more concerned about keeping Apple happy by hitting their sales targets than working with Nokia on its latest me-too product.

Nokia has problems on the high and low ends. The real question is how long can they survive in the middle.

There is never a dull moment in the travel and mobile areas. Nokia and Lonely Planet have just announced a joint venture for travelers to get Lonely Planet travel guide content on their Nokia phones. Each guide cost $13.99, almost the same price as a traditional guide book, but it can be used with Nokia’s maps.

This is really a great development in the travel content area. If Lonely Planet can convince people to pay $13.99 for their recommendations, just imagine how many people will want Geogad’s free travel guides.