Apple’s iPhone might be leaping up the smart phone charts, but don’t tell that to the guys from Symbian, who saw 77.3 million Symbian OS phones shipped during 2007, up 50 percent from 51.7 million units in 2006. The number of handsets with Symbian OS stood at 141 at end of 2007. The company is feeling pretty bullish, mostly because of its expansion in hot Asian handset markets like China & Japan. Nokia and others are doing their part to add more interesting handsets to the mix, as we noted yesterday.
The Symbian numbers are misleading. They include Series 40, 60 and 90 phones, and I suspect 85% of the numbers are Series 40 feature phones.
Isn’t part of the game mindshare for developers? I don’t know enough about programming, but the various versions of symbian all look very different. You can’t make on application to fit them all (s40, s60, UIQ). S60 itself has different “Feature Packs” which are occasionally incompatible.
If you are comparing smartphone, I think we should only be comparing s60 phones with the iphones. I haven’t seen those numbers,. From a developer’s point of view, where would I rather work: on Symbian with a very confusing tiered OS, or with the Iphone/Ipod touch mobile web?
I compare it to Honda vs. GM. GM has have more diversity — but Honda has the Accord (best seller). The cloud is moves to the single platform.