iTWire - Symbian: large market share, largely unused

Symbian: large market share, largely unused

By Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 September 2007 07:03

Symbian claims that 72 percent of smartphone sold run its operating system but a survey of Australian IT managers shows little enthusiasm for it.

According to market research company, Telsyte, its 2007 business decision maker survey found that "the lack of a dominant standard continues to plague the mobile operating system space. More than one-half of Australian companies mobilising their business reported no mobile OS standardisation plans. The rates of indecision are as high as 60 percent to two-thirds among SOHO and small companies."

However "emerging as the OS of choice is Microsoft Windows Mobile, which powers such devices as HP, iMate, O2 and Dopod smartphones, and most recently the Palm Treo 750."

Telsyte attributes this to Windows Mobile having "the Windows OS look and feel that most business users are accustomed to but says that, despite this: "Microsoft's share in the Australian mobile OS market has grown at a rate slower than the vendor would have liked...due to the stronghold fiercely guarded by RIM [BlackBerry]."

Telsyte adds that "Although competition is set to heat up from Microsoft, RIM's outlook remains highly positive as 14 percent of respondents indicated a preference for its OS. Further segmentation analysis shows that preference for Microsoft OS is particularly strong in SOHOs and small businesses while RIM is strong in the medium, mid market and large/corporate segments, where wireless email usage is high."

The overall response from responds on their mobile device OS standardisation plans was: none (58%); Microsoft (22%); BlackBerry (14%); Palm (4%); Symbian (1%); other 1%).

Symbian CEO, Nigel Clifford, was quoted by Reuters following the announcement of the company's annual results last month saying "It was a good quarter for the smartphone sector, but we grew faster than the market, boosting our market share to 72 percent."

Commenting on this enormous discrepancy between sales and usage plans by Australian businesses, Telsyte managing director, Warren Chaisatien, told iTWire: "my theory is that Symbian, by association with Nokia [which owns almost 50 percent of Symbian] and Sony Ericsson, dominates the market by default because of Nokia's - and to a lesser extent, Sony Ericsson's - handset market dominance....I believe a lot of Nokia smartphone users have never taken advantage of the Symbian OS that comes with their phones. [But ] when it comes to actual usage of smartphone functionality, I believe Microsoft Mobile OS users and certainly RIM BlackBerry users deliberately choose their smartphone devices because they want to use the functionality."