Very slowly, and starting from a commanding advantage, if what's available in most stores here in Italy is anything to go by. I recall that Austrian stores were similar: sure there's an iPhone or two, but there are tons of Nokias everywhere. But they are in a bit of a decline and don't seem to really have a clear direction for what to do about it.
What don't you like about the Maemo stuff? Debian in a phone -- what can be wrong with that?!
* Will they really put all their weight behind it? My guess is that there's an internal struggle between that and Symbian.
* Will they be able to make it as nice as Android? I care about the fact that it's open source and hackable, but what most people are going to worry about is how well it works, and what the application writing process is like. I doubt there are many Debian apps that are all that useful as-is on a phone - maybe in 5 years, but not right now.
2) Programatically, they've got Qt now, which is easily comparable to Cocoa, and doesn't require devs to learn a new programming language.
I haven't looked at android's, nor have I heard any commentary, which usually isn't a good indicator.
Out of the 3 (or 5, +palm +msft), it's going to come down to device/network/developer relations. This market's still pretty open, and nobody's really doing a great job on #3 yet.
Then again, I'm wondering if the portable app market's nearly as important as is commonly thought; perhaps the web really has changed this game permanently.
It's a decent environment, is easy to get set up and get going, and works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
The Google guys definitely 'get' how to push their stuff - from day 1, they have had a bunch of guys on #android on Freenode to help people out and answer questions.
Qt is supposed to be pretty nice (I've never used it though), and C++ is certainly popular, but both will require some adaptation to the mobile phone world, and that will take time.
Qt has been running on mobile oses for a few years.
From the bottom of the summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#integrated_Symbian_plat...
We get: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/21/canalys_iphone...
Symbian OS had 50% of the smartphone market as of August 2009. And 50% of the market in that dataset is a majority - probably a good enough a citation for "C++ was the mobile world" when you consider what that would have looked like before the iPhone.
For some reason, people here seem to think that iPhones and other fancy devices are all there is out there.
I originally wrote Hecl to run on a Nokia 3100, which came out something like 5+ years ago, and was certainly not top of the line then (it was about 100 euros, IIRC).
I have no idea if Nokia is able to do an "Ubuntu" on Debian for mobile phones. But I'd love it, if they managed.