Google’s Android is showing impressive growth. Apple’s iPhone iOS is holding its own, while Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, feeling the heat, has a few tricks up its sleeve.
But none of those players yet hold a candle to worldwide sales of handsets running the Symbian operating system, primarily on devices made by Nokia, the world’s biggest cell-phone manufacturer.
The nonprofit Symbian Foundation, a cooperative with several wireless carriers and OEMs that manages the open-source operating system, boasted Thursday that 300,000 Symbian phones are sold each day around the world, or three per second. That’s about a dozen in the time it took you to read this sentence.
The estimate is 50 percent higher than the 200,000 Android-based phones that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said are being activated each day, in an interview with Reuters this week.
Low Penetration In U.S.
The Symbian numbers are based on a Canalys report this week that said Symbian is the first operating system to be shipped on 25 million phones in one quarter.
“The smartphone marketplace has become more crowded than ever,” said the foundation’s executive director, Lee M. Williams. “So the fact we continue to outsell our competitors by such large margins [makes] make us highly confident in our outlook, and we will continue to embrace the challenges ahead.”
Symbian’s world market share has fallen from 73 percent in 2006 to a still-impressive 49 percent as it faces an increasingly crowded field. Many consumers in the United States, however, may never have heard of Symbian because its profile here is so low.
“In the U.S., Symbian is largely irrelevant because of Nokia’s small penetration here,” said Alexander Spektor of Strategy Analytics. Although Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile offer Symbian-based devices, those handsets rank seventh in terms of market share, according to Strategy Analytics.
“It might be a matter of the specific tastes…