Android up, Symbian down
Smartphone OS shares shuffled
Android is the clear winner in the market for smartphone operating systems, showing big year-on-year jumps across Western Europe and in the US.
Not so Symbian, which plunged over here - and has now nearly vanished on the other side of the pond.
The latest figures come from Kantar, a self-styled "inspiration supplier" which runs many of those surveys that host websites insist will help them make their pages better. Its numbers, therefore, only detail consumer sales, not purchases made by big business.
Symbian saw big market share dips across Europe between the week ending 13 June 2010 and the equivalent period this year, the weekend ing 12 June.
The UK is typical: Symbian's share fell from 32.7 per cent to 10.7 per cent.
In the US, never a Symbian stronghold, the OS's share fell from 10.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent in the same period.
Android's rise has been as big, if not bigger, than Symbian's fall, with year-on-year growth rates in the mid-to-upper 30s on both sides of the Atlantic.
RIM is down in most countries - from 32.5 per cent to 8.8 per cent in the US, for example - but in the UK it went the other way: its share of the UK market rose from 19.4 per cent to 22.3 per cent.
Likewise, iOS was down pretty much across the board: its share fell from 30.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent in the UK, though it rose from 21.1 per cent to 28.7 per cent in the US.
Of course, market share numbers only tell half the story: the overall growth in smartphone sales, not recorded by Kantar, is a key factor too. A reduced market share does not mean a given vendor is selling fewer phones, though that is almost certainly the case with Symbian and Nokia.
Android's success has come as it grabs the lion's share of new smartphone sales: 74.3 per cent of new Android users previously owned a voice phone, compared with only 1.4 per cent who previously owned an iPhone.
So Apple isn't really losing sales - but it's not exactly gaining them at the same rate as its key competitors, either.
According to Kantar, 63 per cent of Brits don't own a smartphone. That's the target market, and both Android and BlackBerry are doing well through the appeal of low prices.
Apple has a low-priced phone, the iPhone 3GS, but it's perceived as an old, previous-generation product, not a cheap, current-generation offering. In the UK at least, but undoubtedly elsewhere too, it won't expand its marketshare without a seemingly new low-cost handset.
Assuming, of course, it doesn't prefer to retain margin at the cost of market share. ®
COMMENTS
Just buy old E Series
I now have a collection of the older E Series phones to carry me through the current Fisher Price Phone fad. Nokia are updating the E72 and E52 with a few updated apps and you will find that most of the other apps for Symbian can still be found (but install them now as they will doubtless disappear).
A disclaimer here, I know the E Series do not have touchscreens. I consider this an advantage. I know the E Series are not particularly media presentation friendly, I could not care less. I know that the E Series are excellent at telephony, integrate with Google apps pretty well and have long battery life, all of which I do care about. I also find that my E52 has a DLNA client and control point, FM and internet radio, GPS and maps, integrated (with the native contacts DB) SIP client, and the sort of "home" screen as discussed above. I also understand that some people find it very complicated to use. I don't.
Wilful misunderstanding?
Also available free on most networks on contract, which is how most people buy their phones.
Because of the unique way The Register is funded I should point out that other smart phones are also available for free on contract or for stupid money SIM free.
RE:So...
"Where's Windows Phone in all this?"
Bricking handsets and keeping customers away I suspect.
They did compare like to like
It was a comparison of smartphone operating systems, not the phones themselves. That Android has taken a shotgun approach to dispersement while Symbian has decided to restrict itself to only one manufacturer (well until Nokia carries it outside behind the barn for some one-on-ax-handle time) is a variance in strategy, but discussing the growth or loss of one OS to another is perfectly valid. Now, if the comparison had been "phones that have X specs and features", then yes, comparing Nokia to all the Android ones en masse would be apples and oranges, but this is Grannysmith vs. Red Delicious.
Err, no.
Because Nokia isn't the only manufacturer to make Symbian phones, and not all Nokia smart-phones are Symbian.
