Symbian
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Were Nokia and Symbian always inter-dependent?
Several readers pointed out that in my discussion on the market share of modular vs. inter-dependent market shares for smartphones, Nokia was incorrectly classified as having an inter-dependent software architecture since the Symbian platform is/was a modular component. The problem is that the relationship between Symbian and Nokia is not that of independent modules. Nominally, Continue reading
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The Symbian open source experiment has failed
ZDNet reports Sony Ericsson are abandoning Symbian for Android, and Samsung headed down the Android and Bada road a while back. There are precious few device manufacturers remaining as foundation members, e.g. ZTE, Sharp and Compal, none of whom are exactly trend-setting industry leaders. via The Symbian open source experiment has failed [Gartner]. I was going Continue reading
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What Apple and Android owe to Symbian and RIM
Following up on survey data showing that up to 25 percent of Americans have moved to smartphones, here is another survey (Comscore) which shows that US smartphone users are at about 23 percent. Comscore also surveyed European countries, and we can compare the popularity of smartphones vs. the US. I also indexed the share to Continue reading
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Gartner's Nick Jones on Symbian: Abandon ship
Market share is an existential threat to Symbian, it imperils the very existence of the platform. And the main reason Symbian is losing share is the user experience which isn’t competitive with Apple or Android. Based on the early previews I’ve seen Symbian 3 looks to have polished a few of the rough edges, but Continue reading
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Open always wins, unless it's Symbian or LiMo or Openmoko or Qt
In June 2008, Nokia made its first big move to turn around the platform, and announced that it was acquiring Symbian, with the intent of turning the OS into an open source project. Two years later, the move to open source has proved to be a miscalculation that is slowing down Symbian’s development. It would Continue reading
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At 135 devices, the Android army marches on but what happened to the Windows Mobile legions?
The number of Android devices is rising steadily; it’s already up to 135. Android devotees should rightly rejoice. However, Android is not the first mobile platform with an open licensing strategy. A quick visit to pdadb.net lets us count the number of devices that shipped for every mobile platform in history. We can also see Continue reading
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Does iPhone really have 72% of Japanese smartphone market?
MM Research does not count Symbian as a smartphone platform. This makes them inconsistent with any other analyst for counting smartphones. So shouldn’t Symbian be included? In a comment to iPhone has 72% of Japanese smartphone market | Asymco it’s been pointed out that 12 million Symbian sold in the same time frame as Apple sold Continue reading
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Visualizing iPhone vs Android Shares
Following up on my last post on how misleading US-only share comparisons can be, I decided to draw charts to visualize the comparison. As Android and iPhone compete in various ways, it’s hard to see which is the preferred choice given a direct comparison. In other words, iPhone and Android devices rarely are placed next Continue reading
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Symbian Admob impressions grow 22% in a year
Smartphone impressions triple in a year « Asymco Following up on the previous Admob numbers, it seems that Symbian impressions grew by 22% vs. overall growth of 43%. In absolute terms, total impressions a year ago for Symbian reached about 1 billion vs. 1.22b in February. Symbian’s share of requests therefore fell from 43% in Continue reading
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On Units and Platforms
When thinking about the number of devices shipping out of Apple, and the relative value of those units compared to the competition you have to always think of the platform. The market leader Nokia claimed to have sold 16+ million smartphones in the quarter. When comparing platforms, to whatever Apple ships in iPhones you have Continue reading