Symbian today publish its first set of 2008 results, which showed shipments of 18.5 million devices in Q1, a year on year increase of 16.5%. This takes total Symbian OS device shipments to 206 million. There was also a 92% growth in consultancy service revenue to £4.8 million driven demand for services from 'a broader and deeper range of customer mobile phone products in the pipeline'.
Read on in the full article.
Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis) has an interesting take on this here.
I'd also add a more prosaic reason the lack of major new devices becoming available to consumers in the first 5 months of the year has an impact. In 2008 we've had the Samsung S60 phones and little else. The tail end of 2007 saw the N82 where as early 2007 saw big sellers like E61i, E65, N95, 6120 etc etc. I'm expecting the second half of the year to be a lot busier (N78, N96, 6210, 6220, G700, G900, 5320 and probably that number again in unannounced devices will ship before the end of 2008), and that's probably reflected in the devices under development number.
It should be interesting to see what happens as the price of Symbian devices keeps going down and down.
The upcoming 5320 is launching for just 220 euros, and presumably 2009 will see the first sub-200 euro models which would take Symbian towards the lower-end global mass market for the first time.
Cheap models form the bulk of mobile phone sales worldwide, and if Symbian can get anywhere near 100 euros their sales should explode.
Yes indeed.
They will still be pathetic compared to the number of S60 phone sales 😊
Zuber
35 new countries? Wow.... NOT. Oh and it has 3G.. WOWOW.. NOT...