The Next Web

All your Symbian are belong to Nokia

Written on September 4, 2008 – 10:53 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

I genuinely believe there will be a lot of interesting developments in the mobile industry during the next 5 years that will come from a number of innovative startups, but it’s hard not to get equally excited about the power play between the main vendors and mobile OS distributors.

I’m looking forward to the competition between Apple / iPhone / App Store, Google with the massively potential Android (and “Chrome for Mobile”?), Microsoft with its large Windows Mobile market share and its upcoming Skymarket application store, and not to mention Nokia with its huge bet on Symbian.

Nokia announced about two months ago that it intended to fully acquire Symbian for €264 million (or $410 million) and turn the software over to the Symbian Foundation. This is a group of nearly 30 companies including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone that seeks to turn Symbian into a royalty-free mobile software platform focused on converged communications.

The Nokia / Symbian acquisition has now come (almost) full circle with Samsung backing out and selling its stake to the Finnish mobile giant. 

And the numbers are looking good for Symbian too: during the second quarter, Symbian launched on 19.6 million devices, up just 5 percent from 18.7 million for the same period the year before. Symbian also reported that it had 92 phone models in development (the highest ever achieved), an increase of 48 percent on the 62 models in development during Q2 2007.

Exciting times, indeed.

I hope you like that post!

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

Nokia, Samsung, Symbian, Symbian Foundation

1 Comment »

The state of the smart phone market in EMEA

Written on August 19, 2008 – 1:20 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Research agency Canalys has thoroughly analyzed the smart phone market in the EMEA region, and has come to a number of conclusions worth sharing.

First and foremost, it’s a growth market. Smart phone shipments reached 12.6 million units in Q2 2008, up 28% on the figure one year ago. Even though that’s actually a slowed growth compared to the figure put forward for the first quarter (year-over-year growth of 44%), this makes Q2 the second biggest quarter in terms of volume ever. Canalys estimates that smart phones represented 13% of all mobile phone shipments.

Nokia is still leading the market with over 71% market share, even if their competitors in this segment are taking up market share at a much faster pace. The other vendors in the top five posted much higher than average year-on-year growth, with second-placed RIM closing the market share gap by several points, and HTC, Motorola and Samsung more than doubling their shipments. Canalys cites Apple as an upcoming competitor with the launch of the iPhone 3G in several European countries.

According to Canalys’ estimates, 58% of the smart phones shipped in EMEA in Q2 had integrated Wi-Fi, 13% had touch screens and 38% had integrated GPS.

But are these high-end features being used?

“Today, many owners are not making full use of their smart phone’s features,” said Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham. “Concern over usage costs is still a big barrier, though wider availability of flat rate data plans will help, and usability still needs to improve for certain applications on many devices. People are also wary of draining their battery and not being able to make calls. Battery life isn’t helped by having GPS and Wi-Fi turned on, nor by having a large, bright screen for navigation or web browsing. But there is clear demand for those features and applications, and advances in battery technology would enable quite substantial changes in usage patterns, with all the service revenue benefits that would bring.”

In a previous survey of 4,000 mobile phone users in March, Canalys found that battery life was the aspect of their phone people were least satisfied with.

(Photo credit: jurvetson @ Flickr - yes, that Jurvetson)

Apple, apple. iphone, EMEA, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, smart phone, smartphone

No Comments »