n 11/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">hank williams</b> <<a href="mailto:hank777@gmail.com">hank777@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Bottom line is that Nokia uses statistics to try to claim a larger<br>share of the smartphone market. But their symbian deployments are<br>mainly in non-smartphones, and any numbers based on symbian as a real<br>smartphone platform are deceptive.
<br><br>Hank</blockquote><div><br>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.<br><br>Either way though, you can't argue that nokia is the largest mobile phone manufacturer and they're also the largest smart phone manufacturer.
<a href="http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P8253">Here</a> 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.<br><br>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.
<br><br>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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