Analysts In-Stat only heap ridicule upon themselves with this piece of research. The "big winners will be Microsoft and Linux, at the expense of RIM and Palm OS"? Er... what about Nokia (and Symbian OS) with its 60% worldwide share of the smartphone market?
Read on in the full article.
I must check out the actual report (if I get it from somewhere) to see are the guys at In-Stat totally clueless, or was it just a badly-written summary. I'm sure there is an explanation. For example, the talk about Microsoft/RIM/Palmsource could have meant North America. I guess it is not a secret that NA people have not been able to enjoy the S60 devices in the same extent as we living in the rest-of-the-world...
I think that many people are confusing PDA phones and "Smartphones". On other sites some commentators seem to put HTC's wide range of PDA phones into the same bracket as S60 phones and expect the world and his wife to be buying them by the bucket load from Vodaphone, Verizon etc.
Until HTC (because lets face it like Nokia & S60 no one else seems to be able to put together a "smartphone" that actually makes it to market or doesn't take 2+ years to appear) start seriously knocking out "smartphones" which have a keypad with 0-9 on then I can't see microsoft making serious inroads on S60.
I think HTC might be an upset that you dont consider phones like the Orange C500 and C600 or the imate SP5 or the Cingular 2125 to be serisouly knocking out smartphones. Indeed HTC sell more of these devices than the PDAPhones.
The HTC PDAPhones are a bit irrelevant really - a niche segment, the important thing for smartphones is in the traditional monocot / clamshell form factors.
The Treo-esque pdaphones, and the XDA / HTC Universal get a lot of attention because they're flashy, but in number terms they are not that significant. In anycase these aren't really smartphone at all - they fall into the pdaphone bracket in my thinking.
I suspect the report has to be North American based, but even then you expect some mention of S60 / Symbian. They might not be dominant in the States, but Symbian still has some 20+% share I believe.
This kind of article has appeared many times before on American sites and in American publications. I once wrote to the author of such an article, and he replied that he agreed Symbian was a market leader worldwide but their publication was aimed at the US market and most of his readers were unlikely to be using Symbian devices. He had to write for his readers, not for the world.
You see the same kind of bias when American tech journalists compare wi-fi and cell phones, they imply cell phones are imminently about to be replaced by wi-fi hotspots but that's just a laughable prospect if you spend any time at all on the streets of a European or Asian city. The reason Americans probably think they're comparable is because America has traditionally had much worse cell phone coverage than in Europe and Asia, so cell phones don't work as reliably over there as they do in somewhere like Japan or Germany.
This kind of split between American and Europe/Asia happens surprisingly often in technology matters for some reason. Gaming in the 1980s was dominated in Europe and Asia by computer games with a smattering of consoles, whereas in America it was dominated by console games with a smattering of computers. Consequently you'll find so-called "gaming histories" on American websites where there's little to no mention of the Commodore 64, MSX or Atari ST despite them being some of the biggest gaming platforms ever, purely because they weren't big gaming platforms in America.