Community update: The 850 MHz issue

Nkoli coomac at gmail.com
Tue Nov 6 22:38:38 CET 2007


n 11/6/07, hank williams <hank777 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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


Anyone that calls themselves a "smart phone analyst" should know that
Symbian S40 = nokia feature phone and Symbian S60 = nokia smart phone.
However, knowing the sorry sorry state of journalism today, I won't disagree
that said experts sometimes know squat about what they're analyzing. I'd say
> 60 mil smart phones sold in '06 sounds more likely considering how the N95
sold about 1.5 mil worldwide in only Q2 of 07 and other N series devices
came in at about 7.5 mil for that 3 month period. Not to mention E series
devices that sold 2 mil.

Either way though, you can't argue that nokia is the largest mobile phone
manufacturer and they're also the largest smart phone manufacturer.
Here<http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P8253>is a more conservative
estimate at 56% market share for S60 phones in 2006
as well as other statistics regarding the mobile industry. That website
throws out 70.9 mil total smart phones sold in 2006 which sounds pretty
reasonable.

Again, the majority of S60 phones are sold in countries other than the US.
Nokia moved their focus elsewhere because the majority of consumers here
were not interested in smart phones until very recently. Granted the smart
phone market in the US seems to have exploded this year with more WM and
blackberry devices now that palm is practically dead but S60 phones are
still scarce. Even if nokia only makes 50% of smart phones, that is ~45% of
market share that US consumers have been completely excluded from. Let's say
we buy up to 20-30% of the remaining smart phone market... that's still
around 15% total market share.

Let's face it, the US market isn't very important for a smart phone
manufacturer. FIC could ignore the US market completely and still sell
boatloads of the Neo. To be quite honest, I would prefer if the OM team held
off on the US market for 6 months or so till they can implement quad band 3G
and quad band GSM for a true world phone. They'll certainly be one of the
first to support tmobile's AWS, which would really raise the chances of a US
carrier adopting the phone. Here's to hoping.
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