Unloved and overlooked but still the tops by pages browsed.
For years Symbian ruled the smartphone space, even though with hindsight its devices were clumsy and ill-suited to email, browsing, app downloads and so on.
The arrival of iOS and Android revealed just how inadequate Symbian was and convinced Nokia – its de-facto owner even though the OS is open source – to abandon the platform for its top end devices in favour of WinPho.
And yet, according to data from StatCounter unscrambled by The Royal Pingdom, Symbian finished 2011 over 11 percentage points ahead of iOS.
It went from 30.25 per cent in January to 33.59 per cent in December in terms of its share of web pages browsed.
By comparison Apple had 22.56 per cent in December, Android had 21.74 per cent and BlackBerry 7.86 per cent (half of its share in January).
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2012 will be interesting given that much of Symbian's strength is in emerging markets, where cheap Android devices are now starting to make headway.
The progress of Nokia's recently announced range of affordable Asha Symbian smartphones should give an indication of the OS's enduring appeal.
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Not too hard to believe with the popularity of Symbian OS overseas. Symbian's adoption in North America has failed miserably, however, in other countries overseas they are very popular as they are paired with Nokia phones which are also more dominant overseas. I have a feeling though that as Android and iOS gain popularity worldwide they will become the worldwide leading mobile operating systems.
Glen Suh
www.tapit.com
Glen Suh Jan 4th 2012 at 9:34PM
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