Analyst house, Gartner, has published its findings for global sales of smartphones for the fourth quarter of 2008 and 2008 overall.
The results show that Symbian continues to hold its number 1 position, with a market share of 47.1% in 4Q 2008 and 52.4% in 2008 overall.
According to Gartner, “sales of high-end devices remained good, leading to positive sequential growth for smartphones.”
What concerns me is that Symbian lost 6,1% market share over the course of a single year, how are you going to slow that down and eventually reach growth?
My thoughts exactly. Symbian Foundation must truly deliver its promise of openness and make the development process easier so that more OEMs are interested in adopting this platform in their portfolios, and mobile services providers choose to rollout their services first on this platform. I watch with excitement what Symbian’s next steps will be.
I think the boundaries between “smart”-phones and phones / dumb-phones / feature-phones are very blurred these days. Personally, I always used to think of smartphones as phones that ran a non-proprietary OS and let you install native applications. However, Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerries both run proprietary operating systems (proprietary in the sense that only their own products use that OS, it’s not licensed to anyone else) yet they let you install apps and are generally aknowledged as “smartphones”. On the flip-side you have the Symbian OS based phones for the Japanese market which use the MOAP UI and do not let you install native apps. Does that make them mere feature phones? Throw into the mix the various mobile Linux flavours that are open-source but often closed to the end-users with respect to installing apps and the whole situation starts to get very confusing.
Perhaps it’s time we gave up on the old smartphone / non-smartphone distictions and looked at OS shares of the entire mobile phone market.
I’d be quite interested to see the market-shares and trends of Symbian, OS X, Android etc. vs. S40, OSE etc.
[...] [Via: Symbian Foundation] [...]
Bring on the Nokia N97 as fast as you can!
Don’t let us wait from February till October as Nokia did with the N96. After such a long break all excitement was gone and competitors had launched even better handsets. The N97 holds a big promise, but the Palm Pre and HTC Touch Pro 2 can take it away. If also a new iPhone appears soon, the N97 is lost.
Bring it, Nokia!
Well after Nokia acquisition I am quite hopeful symbian will becomes a true open source with a single flavor (no s60 or UIQ differenciation) which will handset makers, developers etc…
“Nokia, after realizing its global market share going down by 5-8 percent in the recent times finally decided to acquire symbian so that they can speed up the product development by bringing symbian development in house and offer symbian as an open source single flavor platform to developers, handset makers, carriers etc…Before this symbian was not open source and had lot of restrictions for at least the developer community.”
origionally from http://www.blogs.mapp.in
Innovation and free source developer is the winning key… congratulation Symbian
Another review pls visit at http://pda-is-smartphone.com/pda-software
Stefan, Symbian didn’t lose 6.1% marketshare, they sold 6.1% fewer phones in 08 than in 07. They lost 11.1% marketshare.
And, that’s the good spin. If you think the actual marketshare sales are better reflected by the 4thQ, then Symbian lost 15.2% marketshare.
Calling Symbian “top of the pops” is just laughable. Sure, they still sold more Symbian phones than the others, but losing 15% of the market is no reason to gloat.
And, as James notes, the line between what is and isn’t a smartphone is blurred. When is a smartphone not very smart? When it’s a Nokia. Honestly, have you looked at the mobile web usage stats? How can Symbian have so many handsets in the market, and yet noone is using their smart features? Shouldn’t that be the point? Honestly, selling tons of phones is great for the income statement, but if noone is using their phones in smartphone ways, are they truly smart?
I have been a Symbian developer for the last year. In the past I programmed for Windows (device drvers) and Linux. I was very exited when I managed to get a job where I could get my hands on something new – Symbian. I wish I did not bother. If I am not mistaken Symbian is 10 years old but their level of developers support is still disgraceful. No wonder they are loosing market share. They failed to realize that they can not develop everything themselves and need to rely on outside community of developers . Also having hideous tools like Carbide does not help – it’s so damn slow!!! Why don’t they have a look at Microsoft. Yes there are a lot of people how hate it but their development tools are good and fast. You might argue that GUI tool are better but look at the number of windows developers out there. I think the statistics speaks for itself. I just hope that this new open source idea would take off and help Symbian to develop into something usable. And for god sake – ditch Carbide.