Symbian today announced, in their Q3 figures, that more than 100 million Symbian OS phones have shipped. There are over 100 different Symbian OS phones in the market from 10 different licensees and a further 49 are currently in development. In Q3 13 million Symbian phones were shipped, brining the total thus far to 37 million in 2006.
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Notice how the Japanese Symbian models look far nicer than the Euro-American ones? 😞
If you like the "clamshell"/fold form-factor, and that they all look the same. 😉
I see what you mean, I suppose it annoys me that all Euro-American Symbians are grey or black or white. Where are the colours?
Having just been to Japan and seen the FOMA phones in their home context there are two really startling things:
1) A shop full of Japanese phones is a shockingly boring thing. Almost all of the phones look the same (clamshells with slightly varying shapes, but all large), except for the colours. This is not encouraging to someone who delights in innovation, since there is none (I don't consider a different colour an innovation).
2) Japanese spend more time reading content on their phones than talking on them. Having just been in the UK and Greece, where people spend a lot of time talking on their mobiles, the contrast was very pronounced. And it's not SMS's that the Japanese are reading on their (necessarily) huge screens, but content. (The screens are necessarily huge because Japanese language chews up a lot of screen real estate -- in a past life I worked on I18N and L10N in Japan, so it's something I'm very familiar with.)
Now point 1 is exaggerated a little. There are non-clamshell phones. One or two. And there are slight differences in size (but I do mean slight). But the dominance of DoCoMo has so commoditised the market that it's depressingly uniform. I'm so glad Oz isn't like this (or Europe, where most of our phones come from).
Yes, you do get some cool features like the square, photoable bar code things for entering info into the phone, but that's not as prevalent as I was led to believe. And the Suica (Japan's smart card) seems to be behind the Octopus (Hong Kong's) and possibly even the British one (Squid, Shark, whatever it's called).
Point 2 isn't exaggerated. I saw a guy walk into a toilet reading his phone. Put it down on the shelf above the urinal to unzip, then pick it up again to read while relieving himself. Never seen that level of addiction before.
Oh, one last thing. The saddest thing about the Symbian FOMA phones is that they're not really smart phones. They're just feature phones running Symbian. (The difference? Feature phones don't allow native software to be installed by the end user.)