Technologizer » smart phones

A World Divided…By Symbian

Ed Oswald — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:56:38 +0000

While much ado has been made about Android’s rise to prominence, there still remains a large hill for the operating system to climb when it comes to overall usage. When all is said and done, worldwide there are two dominant smartphone operating systems: iOS and Symbian.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together market share statistics based on Web usage it compiled from analytics firm StatCounter. What it shows is a world divided–with Symbian nearly surrounded by iOS to the west and east.

Symbian’s biggest market is the African continent, where it holds about 75 percent shre. It is also iOS’ weakest: about 2 percent of Web traffic comes from iPhones. Symbian also holds commanding market share in Asia and South America, with just over 50 percent share in both cases.

Conversely, iOS’ best market is Oceania, where it has just over 70 percent of the market, and in Europe it holds around 45 percent of the market. in the US, while facing a surging Android, it still accounts for over a third of all web traffic. The US is also Symbian’s worst market, no doubt due to Nokia’s weak position here in the country.

Android fans can take comfort that in at least one country the OS is used by a majority of smar phones, and that’s South Korea at just over 78 percent. But the next closest country is Austria, but only with a 28 percent share of Web traffic. Still a long way to go.

Blackberry leads in four countries, iOS leads in 30 countries–generally in Europe, and Symbian in more than 100. No doubt the fact that Symbian smartphones generally are inexpensive, and thus a smash hit in developing countries, is driving this overwhelming success.

All Hail iPhone, Savior of the Smartphone Market?

Ed Oswald — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:09:58 +0000

… that’s the way investment banking firm Needham is angling it. Along with reporting that the iPhone now controls 16.6 percent of the market for the quarter ending in September, it also said that the iPhone 3G’s success alone is helping to keep the entire smartphone market from collapsing.

Growth was flat from quarter to quarter at 28.6 percent, and Apple’s hit phone helped to keep the industry from going into the crapper much like the rest of tech.

In a way, this contracts some earlier data by iSuppli which suggests that overall the mobile device market shrunk by 1.1 percent in the same said quarter. However, there was no break down on numbers by device type, so there’s no way to really compare and contrast with confidence here.

Either way the biggest loser here is Nokia. Their share has collapsed as the iPhone became a hit. This time a year ago, the company had a commanding 63 percent of the market. Now, that has fallen to just below 44 percent for this past quarter.

Nokia’s strength remains in Europe, Needham notes. Here in the US enterprise clients, who still are a significant chunk of smarphone users, are showing a preference for RIM and Apple’s platforms. Analyst Charlie Wolf chalks this up to the fact that Symbian (Nokia’s OS) is considered “less robust” that either of its two competitors, and Microsoft’s struggles in signing on handset manufacturers.

There’s one caveat to this, and that’s Android. Wolf says he is unsure of the effect of Google’s mobile OS, but if the success of the T-Mobile G1 is any indication, Steve Jobs might want to watch his back.

(Hat tip: Electronista)