With the near-duopoly of Android and iOS well-established in the handset world, it is easy to forget the viciousness of the mobile operating system wars in the early days of smartphones. The traditional cellphone vendors huddled together for warmth around the Symbian platform, but the politics of that effort, and Nokia’s dominance, destroyed it. BlackBerry, Palm and of course Microsoft battled for air. It was not inevitable that the two new entrants would win out, but it was inevitable that the mobile world would only support one or two platforms at massive scale. The lower the costs of the devices and services, the less the sector could survive fragmentation, so as in the IT and PC worlds before it, the…