[ppcsurfr]

Apparently it is only in North America where Symbian devices are not as popular. Almost all Symbian devices available run on the GSM network. Pretty much a minority in NA...

In the Philippines, people buy a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson unit because of the brand. The OS that is built into it being not really being a factor...

Until recently, people are looking for better versions of the Sony-Ericsson P900>P910>and now the P990i. They've come to know the OS and are sticking by it.

The users of these devices have been loyal to the brand for a while now. Nokia being the leader in mobile communications, and those who want to be different going for the Sony-Ericsson.

Okay, so people bought their phones because it was made by Nokia... but then they realized that since it runs on Symbian, they can do much more.

They had good hardware that worked with all previous hardware available from the same company. New Nokia units could easily talk with old Nokia units... vCard sending over SMS, the ease of saving a contact number from a call, from an SMS, cut and paste of tesxt messages, replying with a quoted previous message, etc.

Even Sony-Ericsson phones could talk to Nokia phones and had most of the features as well. But when we tried marketing the Smartphone 2002 powered devices here... all were disappointed that it couldn't even perform any better than the most basic Nokia phone available at that time. Windows powered smartphones surely had special features... a lot of them. But it didn't have the basic features of every GSM phone. Sure, your Smartphone can talk to another Smartphone or a Pocket PC Phone Edition device, but try sending or receiving a business card via SMS in the vCard format. Windows powered devices simply fail at this task.

Nokia and Sony-Ericsson make good phones... That's why people like them. Adding an OS to them becomes an added feature... not a replacement for the basic.

Microsoft powered device are wonderful devices as well, but they've never been good phones. They've never included the essentials of what makes a GSM phone a good mobile phone.