Face it. It is true. That's why the CEO gets kicked out. That's why Nokia's stock has taking a serious beating. That's why profits are down as much as 40% year on year.
Much of the sales numbers of Symbian smartphones are concentrated on the low end, the 5530/5230/5800 types. Prices of phones like the E72 all went down too quickly in their introduction. New phones like the E5 and C6 are selling for well less than $300. which is less than the cheapest HTC Android phone, the Wildfire.
The problem itself is that Symbian, and Symbian^3 doesn't really differentiate much from Android, or iOS for that matter. OS is just OS. They do the same things, just in somethings are done better in others in degrees depending on the OS. Whether its touch, OS robustness, or multitasking.
But what differentiates each other, truly differentiates each other are the services. In principle, its correct that Nokia needs to promote and sell its services. That's why Verizon is doing V-Cast, Samsung has its own app store, HTC making its own maps app---everyone wants to promote their services. The OS is nothing more than the vehicle to these services. That's why Apple pushes its iTunes, MobileMe and App Store. Now its Ping and Facetime. Its all about services now.
Does Blackberry owners actually care about the Blackberry OS? No they don't. Its a crappy OS. But its the services that are superb, the BIS, BES, BBM, the security infrastructure and so on. The core of Blackberry is services.
Microsoft has great services, which is what they're bringing into WP7. Bing Search, Hotmail, Windows Live chat, Zune, XBox Live, Exchange ActiveSync.
Why Android is rocking most of all, is because of Google services. It has done Cloud like no other. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, YouTube, and so on. Just about every location using app in the iPhone's vast library requires Google Maps. Mobile AdSense, Adwords and AdMob for mobile advertising that subsidizes free apps. And Google continues to expand its services, to Google Docs in mobile, to a possible Google cloud based music store.
The thing is, which is the problem, is that, Nokia's own services is trying and still trying. It has its own mail, cloud storage (not very successful), picture uploading service (not very successful too), music store (semi-successful), maps service (semi-successful), Nokia Messaging (so so) and app store (C grade). The problem is that in popular perception, not one of Nokia's services can be perceived as being better than the competition. Its not for the lack of vision---Nokia has stated the same vision many times and they are fundamentally correct about it---but its their execution that has been lacking in both speed and robustness of measure. Or maybe its just their DNA, they are a device company, they don't have the armies of developers, services and massive Cloud infrastructure like Microsoft, Apple and Google.