Smartphone OS developers have for some time been looking to move their products deeply into the mass market, aiming to take smartphones down from the high end and solidly into the midrange of the market. It’s a strategy that looks like it’s quite near to bearing fruit, with a number of developments this week highlighting the shift that is on.

Things are going well in this regard for Symbian: more than a million phones that have its software are sold every week, and it’s growth is continuing. It’s got significant volume now, and is getting more aggressive — as evidenced by the licensing fee changes it announced before the show. It’s also working with Freescale and Nokia to develop a single-chip reference platform that can be easily licensed by manufacturers, that can cut their bill of materials by up to 50 percent as well as increase their time to market.

Access/PalmSource’s new Linux platform is also built with the mass market in mind. Forget the business feel of the old Palm OS, ALP is completely different. It’s a much-needed update to the aging Palm platform that showed its age alongside other mobile OS competitors. ALP could be what finally brings mobile Linux close to fulfilling the hype that’s built up around it over the last few years. The company’s being very smart about how they’re implementing it: the OS and UI easily adapt to different form factors and screen sizes and devices, while the UI is being designed with customization as a means to real differentiation in mind. The Linux APIs ALP will expose will give manufacturers and carriers a significant opportunity to make their devices fit all sorts of uses and niches, further driving the volume Access will want to quickly attain.

So what’s driving all of this? Operators. A Vodafone executive spoke quite a bit at an S60 event yesterday about the company’s handset strategy, but their thinking is pretty representative of most other operators. Vodafone spends between 6 billion and 7 billion euros a year on handsets, and really doesn’t make any money from them. It wants to settle on two or three smartphone platforms that will allow it not only to cut costs, but reduce fragmentation so it can more easily get content and applications — at premium prices, of course — to its subscribers. It’s interested in platforms that will allow it to customize the user experience as well, so it can differentiate itself from its rivals. Clearly it’s settled on S60 as one of its platforms, so look for Vodafone (which was something of a European pioneer in white-label handsets) to get Asian OEMs to license its special custom version of S60 along with the Freescale single-chip platform to start churning out lower-spec devices. Within two years, most of Vodafone’s handset portfolio will be models based on its selected platforms.

The smartphone platforms will allow for rich functionality, hopefully with fewer compatibility (and support) issues than today’s fragmented landscape of closed, proprietary OS and differing Java implementations. So what does this all mean, beyond the fact that millions more users will be able to run native smartphone applications and access richer content and services? It goes much deeper than you might think — so stay tuned for the second part of this where I’ll explain the significant changes ahead for the world of mobile data and content.