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Smartphone Comparison on InformationWeek

By The Guru on January 29, 2007

InformationWeek recently posted a rather lengthy article comparing the numerous smartphone platforms on the market today. Their list includes Symbian 9.3, Palm, WindowsMobile 5.0, Linux, Blackberry, and Mac OSX. Personally, I wouldn’t count Mac OSX (yes, the one on the iPhone) as a "smartphone platform," seeing as how it only uses java widgets, just like any other phone on the market can use, but whatever.
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It’s a very interesting article, and a good read (if you’ve got the time). However, one thing I did notice that I wanted to point out. On the front page, they show this graph. They’re obviously making the assumption that all "smartphones" are primarily used by businesses, and thus, that’s their target audience.

Well, given this chart, one would have to question why Symbian does so well in the world smartphone market. However, I think that’s the key selling point of Symbian. It’s not stodgey and reserved for businessmen with 1000+ contacts and corporate email and all that. It’s designed for regular users who want to have more functionality than the device they shave their face with.

What do you think? Do you think that "smartphone" is intended primarily for the business user, and that Symbian’s downfall to M$ is inevitable, or do you think they’ve carved the non-smartphone smartphone user niche pretty well?

(Via: SymbianWatch)

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The Guru

The Guru, aka Ricky Cadden, started Symbian-Guru.com in November 2006, out of his excitement for the S60 3rd Edition version of Symella. The Guru has used Symbian devices since the Nokia 6620, and is known for his perspective as a power user. You can follow The Guru on Twitter at @Rcadden

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  • http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/ krisse

    Outside the US, virtually no one uses Windows Mobile, Palm or Blackberry. American commentators seem to either have trouble understanding this, or don’t care what happens beyond their borders.

    Take a look at this:

    http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=102926&print=true

    “Symbian accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2006 … Microsoft, Palm, and RIM each accounted for only about 3 percent of smartphone shipments in the second quarter, with Linux accounting for the remaining 19 percent.”

    Windows Mobile isn’t even in second place on the global market, it’s in a distant third with 3% of the market, trailing Linux on 19%.

    There’s also a misunderstanding of who uses smartphones: in Europe and Asia they’re general products, usually sold based on their features rather than as pocket computers. They compete with normal phones, and consequently get a far larger market share than PDAs do because an ever-tinier percentage of the population actually uses PDAs. Almost everyone in the developed world uses a mobile phone though, and vast numbers of people in the developing world too.

    This is probably where the idea that only business people use smartphones comes from, because much of the media assumes that whatever’s true in the US is true around the world. This just isn’t the case in the mobile world, for example compare the long-standing US indifference to text messaging and the Euro-Asian obsession with it: they’re totally different.

    The two largest mobile OSes in the world are Symbian and… Linux. Linux is huge in China and India, and these are the two areas which will shape the development of mobile technology more than the US or Europe. Europe and America are the new Old World (if you see what I mean), and people who want to look to the future of mobile computing ought to look at what is happening in Asia.

    If Symbian is under threat, it’s not from Windows Mobile or Palm, it’s from Linux.

  • http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/ krisse

    Outside the US, virtually no one uses Windows Mobile, Palm or Blackberry. American commentators seem to either have trouble understanding this, or don’t care what happens beyond their borders.

    Take a look at this:

    http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=102926&print=true

    “Symbian accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2006 … Microsoft, Palm, and RIM each accounted for only about 3 percent of smartphone shipments in the second quarter, with Linux accounting for the remaining 19 percent.”

    Windows Mobile isn’t even in second place on the global market, it’s in a distant third with 3% of the market, trailing Linux on 19%.

    There’s also a misunderstanding of who uses smartphones: in Europe and Asia they’re general products, usually sold based on their features rather than as pocket computers. They compete with normal phones, and consequently get a far larger market share than PDAs do because an ever-tinier percentage of the population actually uses PDAs. Almost everyone in the developed world uses a mobile phone though, and vast numbers of people in the developing world too.

    This is probably where the idea that only business people use smartphones comes from, because much of the media assumes that whatever’s true in the US is true around the world. This just isn’t the case in the mobile world, for example compare the long-standing US indifference to text messaging and the Euro-Asian obsession with it: they’re totally different.

    The two largest mobile OSes in the world are Symbian and… Linux. Linux is huge in China and India, and these are the two areas which will shape the development of mobile technology more than the US or Europe. Europe and America are the new Old World (if you see what I mean), and people who want to look to the future of mobile computing ought to look at what is happening in Asia.

    If Symbian is under threat, it’s not from Windows Mobile or Palm, it’s from Linux.

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