+ Why is Symbian virtually absent in the United States?

w900 is expensive cuz it stopped production...w800/k750 can all be found for bargain prices...k800 is much cheaper than a n73~

i think nokia phones stay expensive for a little longer, but no need for a debate
 
ahh but everyone knows it and people aren't scared of your phone either.

some of my family and friends think my e62 is from freakin' outerspace.

i think that nokia needs to make more quadband phones. a friend of mine had an N90 and hated it because of the bad rf. he had no clue it was because he was on cingular and his phone didn't have 850.

another reason is that perhaps not enough people want symbian. they just want their phones to make calls, look cool, send text messages and take crappy pictures. in that order. most people i know want a phone that does these things and could care less about much else.

and whoever said that americans view cameras as a gimmick, i'm not sure i can agree with that. from what i have seen a phone not having a camera is blasphemy. it's almost a status symbol.
 
amen to that! its so lame how only a few of the N Series phones are quadband. Arent the N series phones supposed to be the highest of the high end? I think with more quadband phones Nokia would see a larger amount of phones being imported to the us.
 
"you know, the whole reason i put this blog up was so that i could have a place to put unfettered writing. too often, we are constrained by the rules of writing, as if something as arbitrarily constructed as a piece of writing could ever have rules. notice that i?m not capitalizing? yeah, that?s because i hate taking the time to capitalize. i just want to type, and not worry about it"!

http://ollywompus.wordpress.com/2006/11/13/the-joy-of-writing/




.....at least you know I've read your stuff!!
 
I started out with a Nokia 6600 from t-mobile. I got it because I read the manual online and found it supported email with ssl imap and ability to use authenticated SMTP for outgoing email. I snapped it up and was happy.

As time went on I went to t-mobile's website and the 6600 was dropped and no new Symbian phones were offered. Was pretty bummed out. Wanted a phone with a better camera since I got addicted to moblog sites.

Then someone mentioned the N90 and I just had to have it. Found out it could be had from Ritz Camera. Went there and it was t-mobile branded (in a t-mobile box and the software on the phone starts up as t-mobile and had all the proper SMS/MMS settings.)

Now waiting on the release of the N95. I'll head to New York City to go to the Nokia store if I need to, to get it (I always look for excuses to go to the city, so no big deal there, only 90 minutes away on Amtrak)
 
So back a few years ago I was using a Psion PDA. It ran an operating system called EPOC, which eventually evolved into Symbian. The Psion 5mx was a great PDA. Light years ahead of where Palm was at the time (support for multitasking, a really nice keyboard). The Psion 5mx was a bit like a Nokia 9500 with a greyscale touch sensitive screen and a nicer keyboard. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_5 or http://www.amazon.com/Psion-Series-5MX-Palmtop-Computer/dp/B00000JX3C

The thing is, the Psion PDAs were immensely popular in Europe. In North America though they were pretty much unheard of. Most PDAs in North America were Palms, with eventually a few PPC PDAs.

So fast forward a few years, and it's similar. Symbian, that evolved from EPOC, is very popular in Europe. Here in North America the high end phone/PDA combo market is dominated by Windows Smartphones, Treos, and Blackberries.

Of course, part of this has its origin in the fact that both Nokia and Sony Ericsson withdrew from the North American CDMA market, and we do have a lot of CDMA in North America. However, perhaps part of the issue has its origin in the old EPOC vs Palm days.
 
Motorola will suck the marrow dry out of the V3/RAZR line. They did the same thing with the V60. There must have been 10 variations of that. And lets not forget the multiple variations of the V400/500.
 
There is good and bad in both....the good as you said is having a unique phone that most people gawk at....the bad is the fact that we have to buy our s60s on blind faith and photos from the web. In Dubai you can more than likely walk into a retail store and demo a phone to see if it's physically what you want.
 
These are the best observations so far. I don't agree with those others that say "cheap/sleek" is the reason, since other smartphones are selling well. I definitely agree that the wide spread use of CDMA in the U.S. is one of the biggest reasons Symbian doesn't have a good foothold in this market, as well as a lack of name recognition. And with the complete absense of them from T-Mobile USA, that only leaves Cingular to carry the load.
 
Ok many ppl here are STILL set on Symbian = Nokia.

Someone was kind enough to post a nice Wikipedia link on EPOC=Symbian.
Facts:

1> Ericsson was the first manufacturer to bring Symbian to a phone. Nokia closely followed suite.

2> Motorola had several varying designs of Symbian UIQ devices 1 of which was tested with Cingular 1.2 - 1.5 years ago with their 3G network (Seattle WA).

We're all forgetting that other OS ... Linux. Problem is, is that Motorola changed over to the Linux platform. And because of that Linux is able to proliferate here in the USA. I still say that Motorola's implementation of Linux is very sour; but it can give Symbian & WM systems a run for its money should it take off soon.

Has anyone considered sending feedback en mass to Nokia asking for more North American phone releases/models?
 
Well, Symbian's lack of presence here in the US has a few reasons behind it, most of which have been stated in one form or another during this thread.

1) Nokia, the most significant provider of Symbian-based handsets, dropped their CDMA operations. This immediately lost Symbian around 50% of its potential customers in the US. All Nokia handsets that one sees on Verizon now are actually manufacturered by Pantech, as far as I know.

2) Neither Nokia nor SE have pushed a significant number of Symbian-based handsets onto the carriers who would be receptive to them (Cingular and T-Mobile, basically). The Nokia E62 is a step in the right direction, though, and hopefully its success will lead to other Symbian phones finding the mainstream market here. Most Americans will only buy phones that have been subsidized by the providers, which actually makes sense when the difference is in excess of $200-$400.

3) Though this may be simply restating #2, it doesn't appear that the Symbian device manufacturers care about the US. Few have been released here, and the ones that have been released here haven't seen much in the way of marketing.

4) Windows is king here. Windows Mobile has progressed to the point where it is a wholly functional OS, and Microsoft has pushed it enough to bring it into the mainstream. Just look at the marketing force behind the Q and the Blackjack.

I would love to see Symbian make a push here, but it just doesn't appear to be in the cards. Most Americans aren't willing to import unlocked phones, so until a decent selection of Symbian phones appears on Cingular and/or T-Mobile, Symbian's success here will be limited at best.
 
You mean AT&T Wireless. They weren't a part of Cingular back when they tested out W-CDMA in several cities, and it was around 2-3 years ago. And yes they had a Motorola but it wasn't a Symbian UIQ. It was called A845. I believe mch had one.

http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=509
 
From a Nokia press release in mid-2005:
"Identifying India and China as engines of mobile phone growth, Finnish cellular handset maker Nokia said global mobile phone users would swell to three billion by the turn of this decade.

"By 2010, Nokia estimates the global mobile subscriber base, which hit 1.7 billion at the end of 2004, to reach three billion," said Urpo Karjalainen, senior vice president, Nokia, whose share in the global cellular market is around 28 per cent.

Of these new subscriptions, nearly half are expected to come from Asia Pacific (APAC) countries including China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Mobile penetration in APAC is expected to be the major contributor to the global growth and would surpass the magical two billion mark by this year, he said at the company's annual event Nokia Connections 2005.

Nearly 80 per cent of the next billion subscribers were expected to come from new growth markets and lower-spending segments. "

From another press release from Wireless Intelligence, more recent (Sep 06), which validates Nokia's predictions:
"Worldwide growth is currently running at over 40 million new connections per month - the highest volume of growth the market has ever seen."

Over the four quarters to the end of September 2006, world total net additions were 484 million. Of these, 41% were in Asia Pacific. Eastern Europe and Latin America together accounted for 30% of the growth. Africa took 10% of the growth and the relatively mature markets of Western Europe, North America and the Middle East took the remaining 20% in more or less equal measure.

"Most of the growth is coming from cellular markets with lower levels of market penetration than exists in Europe for example," says Garner. "These are often referred to as "emerging markets", although many of them now have very large, well developed and sophisticated cellular markets with market penetration moving quickly towards European levels."

The top ten countries for volume of new connections over the last year were China, India, Russia, USA, Pakistan, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Between them, they account for over half of the growth in the world cellular market over the last 12 months.

A quarter of the growth is coming from China and India. China's market is still expanding at more than 5 million new connections per month. India has moved rapidly up the top ten list, with the rate of new connections quadrupling over the last 18 months to reach a level very close to China's."

So with 70-80% of the market coming from other than US/W. Europe, obviously Nokia will concentrate their efforts there. With 9-10 million non-operator driven new connections monthly and add to that the replacement market, I feel Nokia is right in attempting to push symbian down the pricing order (e50 has already fallen below $200 mark) and release new models. I know of several people (and am sure a lot of HoFo members) who simply love a new unlocked phone every month!
 
The growth in developing areas of the world is largely filled by entry level phones, growth in the U.S., Europe and the more developed parts of Asia is where you see adoption of smart phones, so this doesn't explain at all why Nokia has not created more Symbian phones for the U.S. market. I wrote an article about all this a few months ago, you can read it here:
http://www.theunwired.net/?itemid=3264&catid=50

And for the individual who said that WM devices need more RAM/processor speed in order to run, I think the problems people have had with Nokia's new web browser are an indication that Sybmian S60 needs more RAM to run as well.
 
Wirelessly posted (Nokia 6620: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320) Opera 8.60 [en])



I think the memory thing does have a small part to play in this whole thing. I love Symbian. It's a great OS. I started with a Nokia 3600 then moved to the 6620. now I'm typing this on a Cingular 8125 PPC. My next phone will probably be the Treo 750. Why? I consider myself to be a power user and if your own web browser can't browse some webpages because of lack of memory that's a problem. Let's not mention how many programs Windows Mobile has in comparison to Symbian S60 V3. Where are all those great apps I used on my 6620? For the time being I'll probably end up staying with WM even though the N75 looks so beautiful (if it's ever even released).Also, other than the N75 where are all the 3G Symbian phones for the U.S.?
 
it seems to me that Symbian is a great power-user platform but not as readily accessible as Palm for many people. It suits me (and us, I mean we are in a forum reading about freakin cell phones, right?) but not so appropriate for mass market, teens and twenty-somethings, chicks who want to IM, etc. I should not forget about the business market - Blackberries are a great example here. They lack the expandability and cusomization my e61 has but provide an easier out-of-the-box experience for Joe-manager who needs email and Outlook syncroniztion with minimum hassle.

I think the platform could be tailored to appeal to those demographics with a few apps but has not been yet.
 
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