I am a big believer in the 60 minute game in football, or the 9 inning game in baseball. Playing it out until the end, no matter what the scoreboard says. 4th quarter, eight or ninth inning comebacks are legend in sports.

Unfortunately, that’s sports, not business. It is really, really hard to recover after being late, even if you have a leading position in the old marketplace. Markets move fast and are very unforgiving, and a miss is hard to recover from.

Smartphone OSes are no different. Today’s news that the Symbian Foundation is out with Symbian 3, their open source version, has miss written all over it. (Not just because I’m an Android[] bigot.)

Our friends at Forward Concepts say Symbian holds 43% share right now, but that’s certain to fall – quickly. Opening the code might stave off the inevitable at the low-end, but the high-end is gone and the middle is in trouble.

While the Foundation expects a “proliferation” of new devices running Symbian under a new open source model, they didn’t have any news of adopters today. Could that be because most of the people who might adopt open source are already on open source – namely Android? Late engineering, no matter how fantastic, will not overcome timely marketing with solid engineering and ongoing improvements.

With that in mind, the prediction: The smartphone OS battle in the long term – 3 years – comes down to Android, iPhone, maybe Blackberry (I know, that’s heresy too), and a distant shot for Windows Mobile or Symbian.

Tell me what you think – opinions or facts always welcome.