When the Microsoft BlackBerry is acquired, who will be next?

Just this week, BlackBerry's decision to accept a takeover underscores a reality that is hard to ignore in mobile computing: A dramatic consolidation is unfolding. The question now is: Who will be the next to be acquired? Who has enough resources to laugh to the last? Nokia agreed to sell its handset business to Microsoft just three weeks before the BlackBerry was sadly bought, the Financial Times reported September 29, and the BlackBerry takeover marks the final stage of a show unveiled 6 years ago with the advent of the iphone.

6 years ago the two smartphones-Nokia and BlackBerry-have now finally had to bow to their knees.

It is unclear whether their new owners, or other companies struggling to survive in a rapidly concentrated market, can shake Apple and Samsung's new duopoly in the mobile computing world. Samsung, supported by Google's Android operating system, has grown into the world's leading handset maker.

"It was a repeat of the same consolidation a decade ago, with Nokia at the time," Bannedick Evans Benedict Evans, Enders analysis analyst. It looks like HTC will be the next buyer. He added that Sony was another "minor" manufacturer with the potential to be squeezed out of the market. Last year, Sony acquired full control of its handset business from its joint venture partner, Ericsson.

A shift in the number of global users to the largest smartphone brands could lead to a depletion of cash flows from smaller producers, which could not compete on a global scale.

Just three years ago, when the iphone 4 was unveiled, BlackBerry was still a major player in the mobile phone industry. The record number of iphone sales in the 72 hours after the 2010 event was almost equal to the BlackBerry's two-week shipments.

Apple's new iphone sold 9 million sales records in the first week, and it will take 31 weeks to complete the same sales from BlackBerry's current slump.

Recent history suggests that the platform's owners will find it hard to attract a large number of advocates once the mobile platform has gone downhill. 2010, the personal digital Help (PDA) and smartphone pioneer Palm was acquired by HP, although it launched a number of highly acclaimed products, but has not regained the momentum of development, was quickly shut down completely. HP has tried to change its development strategy by delegating Palm's operating system to other hardware manufacturers. But it was too late, and Hewlett-Packard eventually decided that Palm could no longer regain ground.

Since the eventual holding of the BlackBerry is likely to be a private equity buyer, the group seems to have no choice but to be relegated to the edge of the smartphone sector.

The decline of the BlackBerry has pushed Microsoft into the spotlight, making the latter the most ambitious competitor to join the war group. With Nokia still a huge share of the mobile device market, Windows phone system has overtaken the BlackBerry as the third-place smartphone platform.

However, according to IDC, the Windows phone system's handsets accounted for only 3.7% of smartphone shipments in the second quarter of this year. Just last week, Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, Kevin Tena to financial analysts that the Windows phone handset remains "the third runner-up to be far behind" relative to Apple and Google.

At the same time, a new group of Low-cost competitors could be one of the biggest challenges for these industry leaders. Many Chinese manufacturers are making their own versions of Android phones that are not bound by Google's official release. According to Evans, such handsets account for about half of the smartphone sales in the rapidly growing Chinese market.