Android currently in number one slot

According to most of TelecomTV's viewers and readers who have so far responded to our Third, TelecomTV Futures, Global Mobile Survey, Android is the OS to watch.

A full 36.2 per cent of respondents have ranked Google's mobile OS top wth 34.8 naming the iPhone as number one. Bad news for both Symbian (fourth) and Windows mobile (fifth) who are currently both being beaten by the Blackberry OS (in third). Limo and Brew are bringing up the rear to occupy the sixth and last slots.

Symbian, in particular, has strong minority support. While the great majority of respondents ranked it at 4 and 5 out of 7, a significant 10 per cent ranked it at number one. We will delve more when the final results are in

But these these numbers are simply the most popular rankings - we've not yet done any analysis of the aggregate scores, so the positions might change.

The Global Mobile Survey is sponsored by Juniper Networks and this is the third in the series. It's designed to garner opinions from those who actually work in the telecoms industry (our readers and viewers) and therefore to shine some light on industry attitudes about directions and trends. By asking some of the same questions each year we're getting a good insight into the way opinion is shifting.

We always ask whether the industry is likely to grow, shrink or keep its Capital Expenditure about the same. Things are looking good: 47 per cent thought CapEx would increase over the next six months; 28 per cent thought it should stay the same and only 15 per cent thought it would decrease. So at least our sentiment is positive.

And we ask: Where should this investment be aimed? For instance, when we ask about growth opportunities the clear winner this year, by a big margin, is currently 'Mobile Social Network Services (with a Web Partner)'.

The least exciting area, our respondents think, is in new voice services. Forty per cent of respondents thought this category's prospects were quite low and only 13 per cent thought them very high. Mobile music and pure data access services also currently score relatively highly.

If you know different, now is the time to chip in and enter YOUR opinions.

When it comes to strategies, the two-sided business model (as espoused by our friends at Telco 2.0, amongst others) is obviously gathering adherents. By far the most popular area for strategic attention is what we defined as "Supporting e-commerce partners, offering advertising, order fulfilment and identity/credit/payment services". Opening up the network through APIs to software developers came in as the second-best idea.

At the same time, however, some of those potential partners were also seen as major threats, so the idea of holding your friends close and your apparent enemies even closer seems to be gaining traction too (frenemies, as the current jargon has it).

'Over the top' players' ability to crash both voice and messaging revenues is seen as a high threat by 40 per cent of respondents, and as 'very' high by 24 per cent.

Handset vendors like Nokia and Apple barging their way into services with music, navigation and video entertainment is feared almost as much, with similar numbers for new entrants such as the supermarkets or Google.

There's still time to get involved and make a difference to the survey result. Click here to tick our boxes and get yourself entered in our draw to win a Nexus One Android handset.

After all, my results tell me (so far) that you all think Android is going to be Number One.