Nokia hit 7 million smartphones per quarter

Yet there'll still be commentators (especially in America) who'll continue to think Palm and Windows Mobile are the only operating systems that count, because they think PDAs are the only type of mobile device that counts.

I get the feeling they'll still be saying this when the total PDA share of the market drops to single figures. All they think about is what they enjoy using, not what the majority of people actually want.

Oh come on. Whilst I agree that the US Market (amongst others) seems entirely blinkered to the sucesses of the Symbian group, your comments concerning "what the majority of people actually want" aren't entirely accurate either.

When someone buys a Windows Mobile or palm powered device they are buying them to use as a PDA\Smart device with comms. How many sysmbian powered devices are ever actually used as smart devices? Whilst no-one can know for certain I'd be willing to bet good money that it is significantly less than 10%.

Most people get symbian smartphones, not because they want a smart device, but because it was the most expensive phone they could get "for free" with their contract renewal. They have no idea what it can do and are not interested that it runs Series 60.

Perhaps it would be more interesting to hear from the likes of handango as to which group of users buys the most software? Whilst still not accurate, it would give a better indication as to which devices are actually being used as smart devices and not just phones. I don't think anyone would be surprised if the ratio was miles away from the ratio of windows devices sold to those of symbian.

Yes, Nokia have sold 7 million smart devices in 3 months and well done them. But lets not start deluding ourselves that the public have BOUGHT 7 million smart devices. In the majority of cases they've just bought a new phone.

The people get it because its free or because it is a Nokia is somewhat weak in my opinion that you often hear when US-centric commentators dismiss Symbian. The figures still hold true. Bassey has it right when he says many people aren't buying them as smart devices (though that is changing, people do want phones with proper image management, connection to a PC, syncing, ability to add software). I actually think the figure is around 15% of users actually making more than a token use of the smart features. But what you consider smart could range on and on... To get a decent camera with software to manage images and an easy connection to a PC could be considered smart (though in a few years I'm sure it wont) - point being the goalposts on the defintion of smart are always moving.

I also think you need to draw a divide between pdaphone (like the Treo) and the true smartphones. You can't really compare PDA's with smartphone. PDA are a much smaller niche, and combining them together in figures is a bit misleading.

I think the issue of people buying it because it a cool / high end phone is just as much of an issue in the Windows Mobile (HTC) smartphone device space. Certainly developers I have spoken too have said Series 60 is starting to come awake through numbers, whereas other smartphones platforms just aren't there yet.

There's no doubt in the smartphone space that Symbian are dominant 90% or so I think. Within smartphone only press there's no way they receive the level of attention that those numbers would seem to dictate.

However even the P-Series from Sony Ericsson (which has outsold the Treo) doesn't really get a fair slice of attention, prinicpally because a lot of those sales are outside the US market. If I recall correctly the P series of phones from Sony Ericsson was one of Handango's best performers in terms of sales (and in average cost per app too).

However I do think Symbian devices are under represented in the media. A good stat / comparison is that there are more Symbian devices than iPods (by some way actually), and that Symbian has a bigger marketshare than the iPod series of players.

Not that I'm trying to diss the P900 and P910, but are you sure they've outsold the Treo, Rafe? According to my reading of the Canalys world figures, Treos sold around 3/4 million, whereas SE must be less than half a million because they're not mentioned in the main table.

Steve

Most of those Palms are actually non-Treos I think. Palm relatively recently celbrated selling 1 million Treos. I know Sony Ericsson has done at least that (I think 2M+) in the lieftime of the P Series. Of course I may be wrong. (It doesn't seem quite right thinking about it).

Rafe

The way I read the table it only covers Q3 2005 and Q3 2004. From memory (highly unreliable!) Q3 2004 would have been the fourth and last quarter the P900 was on sale before the launch of the P910. Q3 2005 is the fourth quarter the P910 has been on sale. Neither of these quarters would be particularly good selling periods for the P-series devices.

I must admit, I find it strange that they were top of the handango list. I know loads of people who got p-series phones because they saw what I did with mine and were particularly impressed with the functionality. When they got their phone and realised they needed to fork out for software (I think I worked out that I spent nearly �200 on p-series software) to get it to do lots of that stuff they couldn't be bothered. They couldn't make the mental jump that they were buying a handheld computer rather than a phone. Whilst people will happily fork out �400 for MS Office to make their PC do anything useful, they expect a phone to work "Out of the Box".

Though I'm glad to see both Nokia and SE have now licensed office suites and various other handy utilities to install by default on their phones.

First of all, you're wrong about insignificant numbers buying Symbians for the smart features, the sales of Nokia Communicators alone are the same as Palm or PPC/MSS. No one would buy a Communicator and not want to use it as a PDA, it has a full keyboard for heaven's sake! Add in the minority of smartphone enthusiasts from all the other varieties of Symbian (S60, UIQ, MOAP) and it's clearly the biggest mobile computing platform even if you only count people who actually use their device for its PDA functions and are aware of what OS it's running.

Second, you're missing the point if you're saying "what percentage bought a smartphone as a smartphone?", for several main reasons:

1. Percentages mean less than numbers. Even if 100% of Palm users bought their device as a PDA, that isn't as big a number as those that bought a Symbian as a PDA.

The manufacturers (of both the device and the operating system) make almost all their profits from the sale of the device. Once the sale has happened, they've succeeded. The sale then provides the money to cover the cost of making new models and developing a better OS, so there'll be an even better iteration soon with even better hardware and software features. If PDA sales (or even market share) are going down, it doesn't matter if 100% of their customers bought it for "smart" functions, they'll simply have less money than their smartphone rivals to create better devices and a better OS.

The bigger selling OS will (probably) get better and more numerous models than the lower selling OS, so both the OS enthusiasts and those totally ignorant about OSes will get something out of those bigger sales. The enthusiasts would be riding the coat-tails of the "ignorant masses", which has been the case in computing for a long time now.

Many, if not most, PCs now seem to be bought largely as a way of accessing the internet, and bundled pre-installed software like word processors might get used too, but a lot of people are totally uninterested in installing anything themselves. My parents for example had a broken CD drive on their last PC but they never noticed, it was only when I visited them once and tried to install something myself that I realised it didn't work. Had I not tried, they might well have had the PC for years and never known about the broken drive.

Does that mean the PC format isn't a good one for software developers? Of course not, it just means that those who make full use of their PCs are being subsidised by those who don't. The enthusiasts are getting better and better machines partly because non-enthusiasts are buying them too.

2. Just because someone buys something without realising its "smart" doesn't mean they aren't potential customers for "smart" software. There's already a mass-market for Java games and apps, and I've seen an increasing number of mainstream smartphone titles sold in exactly the same way (UltraMP3 for Symbian was being advertised by Jamster/Jamba in TV commercials on MTV, for example). It's a proven business model for Java, why wouldn't it work for the even more impressive games and apps you get on smartphone OSes?

Note that none of these Java-style downloads would be via complicated sites like Handango.com where you're required to know the operating system (including its version) that your phone uses. None of these Java-style downloads require you to transfer a program to a PC, then to a memory card or wireless connection, then to your phone.

This has been a big barrier for a lot of smartphone users, that you have to mess about with a computer (and many of them don't have a computer believe it or not, or don't have a card reader or wireless adaptor) rather than just entering a simple phone number or web address into the phone itself.

I know this because when Nokia gave away the Snakes game for N-Gage, the instructions only covered transferring it by memory card or bluetooth. Loads of people asked about how they could transfer it straight to their phones like Java games, they couldn't transfer it by computer (some of them didn't have a computer!). In the end I set up an unofficial site myself, and it got hundreds of downloads despite a big warning saying they'd have to pay GPRS charges. They mostly didn't care, the convenience was worth more than the few dollars the download would cost.

As GPRS charges go down, internet speeds go up with 3G, smartphones become wi-fi capable, and smartphones make up an increasing chunk of the general phone market, Java developers can transfer seamlessly to the smartphone market and publish Symbian/Windows/Palm games instead.

Instead of saying "do you have a Symbian/Windows/Palm" they just list compatible models of phones and the number you text or site you have to go to to get them, no one has to even know they have a smartphone for this to be a viable business model. They might even carry on calling them "Java" games and apps even though they're not, because that's just the common word for a program you download onto your phone.

4. Smart features don't have to be advertised as smart in order for them to be appreciated by the customers and the manufacturers. Smartphones let you have 3D games, let you have high quality photo and video editors, or high quality MP3 player software. Smartphones let operators or even individual retailers pre-install features to add value to a device, in exactly the same way PC shops do. If there's a particular niche market, they're very easy to cater for simply by installing the right software, and if the market changes you just change the software.

If you say "this phone lets you do word processing and email" or "this phone works like an ipod" or "this phone works with instant messages" or "this phone lets you shoot video, edit it and publish it on the internet" or "this phone lets you do all these things at once", at least one of those things would probably interest someone who wouldn't have been interested in mobile computing in general.

-"Would you like a pocket computer?"
-"No."
-"Would you like an ipod phone that lets you buy music straight onto it?"
-"Yeah!"

The two things are essentially the same device, yet their appeal is totally different. One is aimed at technophiles, the other at music lovers, and music lovers are a far far larger group.

Customers don't have to know it's a smartphone, all they have to be told is how the features would make their life easier or more fun.

How many people would buy a PC if it didn't come with a pre-installed word processor and browser?

I think people are getting much better at making use of their phones capabilities. Lots of people I know now seem to have heard of Symbian and Series 60 and I would not call many of them geeks. Its more of a word of mouth thing they see a friend of theirs using some function on a phone that they want to do. So they either get them to tell them how to do it on their existing device or failing that get one that can.

I think the software downloads is a bit of a red herring. You can make use of a Smartphones capabilities as a smartphone without downloading extra software. In fact the built in software probably caters for most peoples needs apart from games. I mean how many people actually buy software for other devices. I used to know quite a few Palm owners but none of them ever added any software. How often do people actually buy new software for their PC's? Many people just use the bundled Web browser, Mail and word processing and other software.