Community update: The 850 MHz issue

hank williams hank777 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 6 21:18:41 CET 2007


 This article compares smart phone adoption among
> recent buyers as of the time of writing in different countries - US adoption
> was pretty abysmal back in 2006. While I'm sure it's increased since then,
> 20-30% is still a very far stretch. I think 8% would be more accurate.
>


The problem is that a lot of the "smartphone" analysts differ in what
a smart phone is. I have seen analyst statistics that say 20m smart
phones were sold world wide in 06 and I have seen stats from other
analysts saying 60m smart phones in the same time period. The 20m
numbers include RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm, and only the high end
Symbians. The reason for this is Nokia sells lots of Symbian phones
that really have nothing to do with being smart, or substantively
programmable, which is for me the real benchmark for smart phones.

When you look at "real" smart phone sales - i.e. the 20m number, a
very significant number of those are sold in the US. This is just
based on the fact that most palms and blackberrys are sold in the US.
The Neo is cutting edge and so really only comparable with the other
high end phones.

Bottom line is that Nokia uses statistics to try to claim a larger
share of the smartphone market. But their symbian deployments are
mainly in non-smartphones, and any numbers based on symbian as a real
smartphone platform are deceptive.

Hank




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