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  • Lies, lies, and damn statistics.

    Isn't the Symbian share of the "Smartphone" category, based on lower-end phones? I think of the high-spec, high-end smartphones, its Windows, then Apple, Blackberry, then Android at the top. Just guessing like. And of the ultra-high-spec, its Windows, then Android.

    It depends what criteria you use for a smartphone. Historically it's been an open device that has an SDK in a native language, i.e. C or C++. That's the criteria Canalys use in the figures I quoted above. The Symbian platform has been leading the open OS market for the past 10 years. Blackberry is next, then Windows, then Apple and finally Linux in all it's flavours including Android.

    The recent discovery of smartphones by the US tech press has seen them clamouring to change the definition so that Apple and Android can be seen as market leaders. They're not by any stretch of the imagination. For example, did you know that the iPhone accounts for just 6% of mobile phone sales in the US? Given the hype you'd never think that was the case.

    The Symbian platform is scalable, meaning it can run in high end devices like the N95, the N97, the Samsung i8910 and the Sony Ericsson Satio. It can also run in mid tier devices like the Nokia 5800 and 5230. It has a flexibility that none of the others have, mainly because it's been architected from the beginning to be optimised for mobile devices (rather than being a desktop or server OS shrunk to work on a lower power processor). This is why it is the market leader because it is available at a lower price point than any of the others thus opening up new markets for smartphones, i.e. India, China and much of south east Asia.

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