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Sales of Symbian phones do not reflect the popularity of the OS - not by a long shot.
In the US, the concept of "smartphones" is still in its infancy - or maybe it's a toddler by now. Just talk to the average cell phone user - not geeks like us, but your sister, your Mom or Dad; the person who sits next to you at your office. To most of them, cell phones (in the United States anyway) have always been, well, just cell phones. The ability to make and receive telephone calls anywhere is a tremendous convenience. But they are not actually computers, are they? "Well, yes, they can hold all of my contacts, and oh, that's true: I can now download and read my e-mail on my cell phone. And, OK, yes I CAN play some pretty neat games on it. But they are still not computers, right? I mean, a computer is a computer, but a cell phone is just a cell phone. Isn't it?"
Smartphones are what the wireless companies portray them as to their average customers; they are only as "smart" as the wireless companies allow people to perceive them to be.
Portable computers and cell phones are not even considered in the same family at all, by most US consumers. The majority of users of handheld devices in the US use Palm or Pocket PC devices. Smartphones have really just starting to catch on here. However the smartphone platforms that are catching on are MS Smartphone and Palm. Symbian devices are just starting to be “discovered” here. Symbian fans may not like hearing this, but there are some valid reasons why Symbian has yet to become a popular platform in the US.
Less than 10% of the phones offered by the US wireless companies that use GSM were Symbian phones, according to 2004 data. (Nothing later is available). Employees of those companies give me a totally blank stare when I ask them what devices they sell are running the Symbian OS. It's like I suddenly started speaking a foreign language to them! Why is this? How can Nokia NOT promote their Symbian OS devices to the US market? When I inquire about smartphones, every employee I spoke with could rattle off all of the features offered by Microsoft. But each and every one of them did not know that Nokia sold a smartphone! Even though they are authorized Nokia dealers! They would all explain the nice camera and all of the neat ringtones the phone could play. A search of the Cingular Wireless web site for the term "smartphone" that I performed while researching an article in late 2005 yielded the following result: "http://www.cingular.com/smartphone, a Motorola MPx 220 - a smartphone running microsoft's Windows Mobile OS and software". Yet they sell several Symbian OS smartphones! Neither Cingular nor Nokia see fit to promote the Nokia Symbian phones as "smart".
As for Symbian's sales volume in the US, they flooded the market here with "giveaways"; the phones that have been offered as "free" by Cingular and T-Mobile for the last two years, are usually not even supplied with a data cable - just a charger and a case. 20 to 30 million Symbian "smart" phones flooding the market in the last few years as free offerings to wireless users can certainly inflate the sales volume numbers in the marketing game. But it doesn't make it a more successful platform - not even close.
The biggest segment in the US - I'm not counting us geeks - is the business segment. But they are using almost exclusively Blackberry phones. How many business in the US are offering Symbian phones as the primary mobile device? But many are turning to MS Smartphones and PPC phones recently.
Of course by refusing to allow access to API's, Symbian is hampering its own market. While the Symbian platform is possibly the most stable OS purely for phone features, the extraordinary lack of robust 3rd party applications will continue to stifle the use of Symbian phones as smart mobile devices in the US marketplace. The main problem is that Nokia refuses to share any of their potential revenue with 3rd party software developers - they want it all! And as long as they continue like that, they will produce "smartphones" that are, well, not quite as smart as they would like to think!
(Parts of this post is paraphrased from an article I wrote for an online magazine in 2005).
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