[desertrat_blog]

Originally Posted by JMac

In the US, the concept of "smartphones" is still in its infancy - or maybe it's a toddler by now.

The development of the mobile phone market in the US has been hampered by the incompatible networks and lack of even nationwide roaming. In contrast Europe and most of the civilised world had chosen to adopt the GSM standard and hence gained enormous advantages in the choice of handsets, competition between networks and international roaming (though consumers are still shafted by the cost of roaming).

Just talk to the average cell phone user - not geeks like us, but your sister, your Mom or Dad; ...

I think the same observation is true of most places, only the sophisticated users, the early adopters, the geeks, the technophiles would care about the underlying OS. Your everyday user wouldn't even know what an OS is.

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.

MS has been playing that game for decades, with their MSDOS and Windows tax.

Of course by refusing to allow access to API's, Symbian is hampering its own market.

Could you please elaborate? You mean the SDKs that Symbian provides are incomplete and like MS, Symbian (and by your assertion I take it you mean Nokia as they are the major shareholder) are withholding secret API calls that makes Symbian produced phones more powerful than non-Symbian produced phones - doesn't make sense to me, Symbian don't make phones.

While the Symbian platform is possibly the most stable OS purely for phone features,

True

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.

This is completely unscientific and most likely inaccurate (but at least it provides some figures - unlike your assertion), I had a look at handango's site, chose the Windows Mobile Smartphone (what an oxymoron!) category then chose Motorola MPx220 (as that was mentioned in your post) and result was "1799 software titles available for download". When I chose Symbian OS there was "6457 software titles available for download". <shrug>