The mobile phone operating systems you hear about most in the news are BlackBerry® (RIM), Apple® (iOS), Android™ and Windows®. However there is a sleeper OS, which is not mentioned often but holds the number one Smartphone sales spot: the Symbian OS. When I say sleeper, I mean it is not an OS generally thought of by the general smartphone user population. According to Gartner Research the Symbian OS sold 29,480,000 units in the 3rd Quarter 2010, giving it 36.6% of the market share. It currently holds the top sales position within that quarter. This is down from 44.6% of the market share in 2009, and the reduction is due to the surge of Android, Apple, RIM and Windows phones now on the market.

So why are we spending time discussing Symbian OS? We wanted to briefly cover it in this blog for two reasons: one to inform those that don’t know much about the OS and to discuss where we see it going in 2011.

What is Symbian OS?

"Symbian was the first platform specifically developed for smartphones - it started the smartphone revolution and remains at the heart of the movement, powering more than two-fifths of the world’s smartphones," according to the Symbian Foundation website. Symbian was originally developed by Symbian Limited and is a descendant of Psion’s EPOC. In 2008, Nokia acquired Symbian Software Limited and worked to transform the platform into an open source code platform. In February 2010, the platform was made available to developers as a royalty-free, open source code platform. Nokia is one of the primary users of the OS and continues to foster its evolution.

Why it is top in sales, but never discussed with the others?

One major reason that it doesn’t get the hype like the others is it’s not marketed the same. While Symbian is a Smartphone and phone OS used by Nokia in most of its phones, Nokia does not market its phones in the same manner as iPhone™, BlackBerry and Android. You don’t see many advertisements on TV, Radio or the Internet for Nokia phones or for Symbian OS. In fact there is little buzz in the general public for new Nokia phones or apps coming out on the Nokia "Ovi" Store. That doesn’t mean that Nokia is not producing competitive products, it just means that they have chosen not to focus their advertising and marketing dollars towards the American consumer. This means unfortunately a lot of consumers do not know about Symbian OS and might not know that Nokia produces competitive smartphones. Another reason that Symbian OS and Nokia are not part of the smartphone competitive discussion is that there are many versions, screen sizes, devices and phone networks that Symbian uses and runs on. This makes it a challenging mobile application development environment. While mobile app developers like the open source code platform, they find it hard to develop apps for Symbian because they can’t possibly predict and develop for all devices and screen sizes. Developers and app creators have been gravitating towards more regulated platforms in order to produce revenue generating apps. This is a problem that Apple has been able to avoid by controlling its manufacturing of hardware devices.

Future of Symbian OS

We believe that as long as Nokia is nurturing, evolving and developing Symbian, it will have a bright future in the mobile phone landscape. Nokia is not going to go anywhere, at least not anytime soon, which means Symbian won’t be either. In fact, while writing this blog, Nokia announced at the 2010 International Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing that it has plans for major Symbian OS updates in 2011. The updates, slated to occur Q2 and Q3 2011, are "a new look and feel for the user interface, a more flexible home screen, an updateable HTML5 browser and an easier software update experience," according to Nokia’s presentation. This is exciting news and we are eager to see what Nokia cooks up for Symbian OS in 2011.