Android overtakes Symbian as the leading smartphone platform in Q4 2010

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Reshard

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Really? I think Palm was dead when HP bought it and that HP is going to inadvertently squeeze out and waste whatever life was left in the platform. All of Palm's creative talent is gone (to Nokia?). In spite of being American and having a solid following and a capable development community and receiving extensive praise from American media and bloggers, Palm has never really gained any traction on its home turf and it's virtually unheard of elsewhere in the world. I think you can stick a fork in Palm, HP or otherwise.

With regards to Motorola, like I said, I don't think that buying Motorola makes business sense. Paying a lot of money to buy a company that doesn't make any money isn't smart. Plus, Motorola has debt that Nokia would have to assume. On the other hand, I think that a lot of the reason Motorola doesn't make money is manufacturing-related and if a lowest-cost-operator like Nokia could do the manufacturing and distribution it's possible that they could turn Motorola profitable and achieve savings that way while still letting Motorola operate semi-autonomously and without cutting R&D. I'm not sure how practical that is, though. In reality, I think Motorola is a pig and that buying it at this price would be a poor business move.

EDIT: Just looked more closely at Motorola. Motorola's gross profits are lower, its R&D expenses higher and its selling, general and administrative expenses higher as a percentage of revenues than Nokia's.

I do like the two-brand idea in principle, though. In fact, Nokia already has this concept in place with Vertu so it would be a third brand.

In other business thoughts, I'd like to see Nokia divest itself of NSN. They might have the opportunity to do so in the next couple years for a nice price at the peak of the 4G deployment cycle, but the sooner the better, IMO.
 
A historic moment as Symbian is knocked off its number 1 position in smartphone marketshare in Q4. When was the last time Symbian was no.2?

I am a bit surprised it's happened so soon. It's bound to increase speculation about Nokia using Android for some of its handsets. I wonder if a Nokia OS will ever regain the no.1 spot?
 
That's true, but like the main brand, again, if it's the U.S. market Elop wants to crack, Vertu has even lower traction in the States. Vertu is a totally alien brand, and one of Nokia's biggest challenges in North America is partly a branding problem.

Branding is hard; it takes years and years to build up, but can be torn down in much less time.

As far as NSN, I agree; in fact, both partners are looking to get out of that business as soon as they can. The Chinese network infrastructure companies are licking their chops at the chance to own that market worldwide, and they just may.
 
I'm not saying Nokia should use Vertu as its American brand, just that it already operates more than one brand and doing so isn't a foreign concept. I think that a separate brand for America is a totally workable solution, again, in principle.
 
hmm, so nokia managed to sell 31 m "outdated symbian" devices in this quarter but i thought symbian was dead /s. Anyway , good to see these numbers because the competition will drive nokia to bring more better operating system and phones to market. However, keep in mind that the total andriod shares are 44% vs 8% symbian, so it still has long way to get over it. But I think the most frightening thing to nokia are the cheap phones that come from non-branded companies (zte, hawie, ets..) because they can sell dumb phones easily so they are the real competitors to nokia.
 
Heh all I'm saying is this "10 manufacturers of android vs 1 manufacturer of symbian (Nokia)" might be more fair of a comparison than some people may think because all these companies have the option of picking symbian over android. No reason why they couldn't, its just android seems to be the preferred choice.

It could even be argued that Nokia is so large and produces so many models that its equivalent to many of the smaller ones android models. So it could be more of a threat to Nokia than initially realized.
 
If I can find the quote I'll post it, but I remember the CEO of Nokia a long time ago making the quote that he didn't want to end up like the PC market just making boxes (low margin) so that Microsoft would make all the money with their OS (Windows). I'm guessing that's why Nokia has been so dead set on not using Android (even though it is currently free) or any other OS, because they don't want to become just another box maker. But it seems from this article and probably many like it that Nokia may have to go that way or become irrelevant.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41354670/

Sad as I use to avoid Nokia because they became so big, but now I've come back because I don't want to be an iSheep or join the Android Wagon. I like being able to download any application rather being told what I can and cannot download and Nokia make solid phones for reception at least.
 
You are right, if they chose to dumb symbian (s40, s60 ets..) and use andriod they will likely able to make profit and thr whole company depratment will drop dead inclulding massive layoffs from the second largest R&D companies and it will create chaos in europe and in asia. The wise choice for nokia which is they doing right now is to stick to symbian and improve it by introducing QT and other improvement on top of it;Also they will also introduce meego in this year and it not going to be dropped by nokia because if you went to nokia career website you will see they want a lot meego development engineers.

One last remember apple will introduce iphone on CDMA network so it will effect android shares from this year . Meego , RIM, and Microsoft will also effect the market share this year also
 
ok....
IMO it's still not fair and is screwing with the numbers...
basically they're comparing Google's software/different manufacturers' hardware to Nokia's hardware/software.....
let's keep the comparison's the same...
I expect Gizmodo to play that game, not engadget...
 
True. But It's getting so close, so quick, does it really matter? Seems like a guarantee to happen in the very near future to make it almost moot as to the exact cross over point.
 
The tech news is all abuzz about 'Micro-nokia', as Engadget calls it. It's still in the rumor stage, but a groundswell is forming, and the NY Times just gave it some extra juice.

Still, not sure how wise a hook-up with Microsoft is, but that's another argument.

The buzz at The Business Insider is that Elop, according to their Nokia source, will be flattening the structure between top executives and engineers and firing a bunch of middle managers, and possibly splitting the company into two---a hardware division and a software division.

The other scuttlebutt is that Elop is dropping one of the internal OS', either S40, Symbian or Meego.

Other rumors: that Nokia will adopt Windows 8, when it's ready in 2012, for tablets.

Whatever the truth is, what appears to be true is that Nokia and Microsoft are tying themselves together to announce something big in mobile, whatever that's going to be, and no, I don't think it's only about Office on Meego.
 
That Engadget article pisses me off, with the added graphic of the Android mascot with the "#1" on his chest. Engadget added that and is show who they were cheering for.

Well on to a bit of fact, well lack of it. I'm not too sure that the numbers are accurate, no one was expecting those results, even other research firms only put the estimate of the entire year at 45 million for Android handset sold, and in the report that Engadget sourced, 33 million were shipped in the 4Q. I wouldn't be surprised that this gets debunked.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure with all the hype behind Android, they will have the number 1 position at some point, just not now with the years total, Android is still number 2.
 
I think for the windows phone 7 rumors, its not the end of the world or Nokia. It could just be a one device experiment to see how the market reacts to it. Nothing wrong with being bold and taking chances like that. Nokia's existing strategy can still continue to be executed. Worth a shot.
 
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