Ewan Spence reflects on the Symbian Smartphone Show, the message from CEO Nigel Clifford, and finds that even the 'big' announcements paled into comparison with the overall convergence strategy.
Read on in the full article.
Symbian - a Very British Company
Great article Ewan.
The chart showing worldwide smartphone market share was very striking indeed, only in America was there a noticeable share for RIM, Palm or Windows Mobile, which goes a long way to explaining why American commentators keep ignoring Symbian and simultaneously fail to understand the rest of the world's indifference to American smartphones and PDAs.
The explanation for this might be America's slower uptake of mobile phones in general, while Europe and Asia have had an everyone-owns-a-mobile-phone culture for years now. This in turn could be explained by the rather poor service provided by the phone network operators in the USA: they provide much worse coverage, worse signals, higher prices, less interconnectivity (it took a while for texts to even be able to travel from one network to another), fewer features on their handsets (for years they've removed features present in Europe and Asia because it threatened their revenue sources, even this year they stripped the E61 of its wi-fi before they'd support it as the E62), and a generally more arrogant attitude to the phone market.
Americans have been treated poorly by most of the people who provide their mobile phone services, so in turn they feel less inclined to use mobile phones in the first place. As a lot of columnists have noted, the American idea of mobile computing is inspired more by desktops and laptops, so most of their mobile devices are things like the Blackberry or Palm or Windows Mobile PDAs. It's a more nerdy niche market there, you wouldn't see someone buying a mobile computing device without being aware of its abilities, and the phone network operators just don't seem to see the potential benefits of placing a smartphone inside everyone's pocket.
The trojan horse effect that has allowed Symbian to expand so far works in the rest of the world because mobile phones are incredibly popular anyway, but in America they're just not as fond of phones.
In other news, also very interesting to see Symbian so dominant in Japan, where traditional manufacturers such as Nokia are virtually non-existent.
And the huge share for Linux in China is something to watch too. Very very few Western commentators are talking about Linux smartphones (understandable as Europeans almost all use Symbian and Americans almost all use WM, Palm or RIM), but China is going to be such an overwhelmingly dominant market that it alone could make Linux into the biggest OS of all.