Actually NOKIA and SYMBIAN are losing market share to samsung, apple and blackberry.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/11/nokia-continues-to-hemorrhage-smartphone-marketshare-to-rim-app/

Nokia losing market share in Western Europe

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125849841919652777.html

thats engadget, everybody knows they hate nokia because symbian sells x5 what the iphone does.

they actually gained 6% of marketshare last quarter, and samsung uses symbian too.

their sales increase, but RIM and iphone were getting bigger increase due the US. the thing nokia share Worldwide it's bigger.

if u put android, iphone and rim together, they barely pass nokia.

and thats also old news, 5800 was a success selling over 10 millions in a few months, a n97 was 3 million in the first months of sales.

Sir, you are very, very wrong. Its not Engaget, it is analyst firms that track smartphone OS penetration. Symbian has lost marketshare for quite some time, and so has Nokia.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/10728_Gartner_Q3_2009_Smartphone_Sal.php

Nokia dropped from 42.3% in Q3 of 2008 to 39.3% in 2009. That is from Gartner which is the largest, best, and most accurate firm concerning handset penetration.

Then it reaches a point of maturity? The question is when will it reach that point. I believe it is going to take awhile before smartphones and phones with a major operating system (Android, Symbian, ect) mature, as its an emergent technology.

And I certainly agree that other, non-smartphones will gain features to maybe make what we know irrelevant. But guess what? They will still use Android, iTunes, Symbian and the like. That is where the games are. So if you are indeed correct, then it means there will be an even bigger game market. I am not trying to argue smartphones will drive the games as much as I am arguing that the operating systems will provide a central delivery platform for gaming content that will surpass the delivery system of the handheld console. What happens if featurephones (which are in between dumb phones, and smart phones) start running Android and can play decent 2D games? That opens up an install base that is larger than that of handheld consoles by wide margins.

And I am not understanding your argument concerning 'if mobile games would have eaten handheld consoles, then they would have done it a long time ago'. You do not understand the technology behind mobile gaming deployment.

Here's the thing: delivering gaming to cell phones has been a very difficult business, which is why it hasn't become a major business to compete with handheld consoles, until now. Gaming companies have had to develop their products for dozens of phones, each with their own unique operating system, and ways to deploy content (such as through retail websites, market places, or carrier websites). That caused the market to be very, very balkanized - too many phones, OSes and ways to deliver the content to make it a worthwhile market for major devs. That changed when the iPhone came out, as it was one OS, one phone, and one content delivery service. Now, you have the smartphone providers offering centralized market places for millions of phones.

3 years ago, if you wanted a game, any game for your phone, there was a very small chance that you could purchase it. The dev had to of worked with the phone, carrier, and deployed the product to a market place. Now, it is a very quick process which is yielding a much better result. This is like the de-balkanization of the console market when the NES came out - there were many competitors offering one-off technology, and many clones. One company played very strongly into the market with a robust experience, and then the market solidified into a major force.

As for gaming content on the Android and iPhone marketplace, here is why I stated they are a larger force than the other 3:

• Market Share - Android and the iPhone are both growing. Symbian and WinMo are shrinking. This is an absolute fact of the market.
• Market Place - Android and the iPhone have the oldest market places available. iTunes has had games since August 2008, and Android has had it since February 2009 (paid games, mind you). Ovi (Symbian) launched in April 2009, BlackBerry App World in May 2009, and WinMo market in October 2009.
• # of Titles - The iPhone has ~30,000 games on their market which is larger than every other market combined. Android has more games than Ovi, AppWorld and WinMo market do, combined.
• Phone Usage - What kind of people use each type of device? BlackBerries are primarily business-class, so gaming will not become very prominent. Symbian is deployed on a lot of basic Nokia phones which aren't used for app and web browing. AdMob does a lot of research into this, and the fact is that Symbian greatly underperforms vs. every other phone in terms of web usage. WinMo is a good choice (comparatively) for demographics, but they are losing a lot of market share.

And going deeper, I think Android will eventually win the war in 2012-2013 due to form factors - Apple is doing well, but they have thier hands tied behind their back due to one phone, and only on specific carriers. That makes it difficult to really get massive adoption. Android doesn't have this problem, as they can be on virtually any carrier. Heck, Android may wind up being on flip phones next year to deliver featurephone abilities at very cheap prices.

Hopefully this all makes sense.

To sum it up, I make this statement:

What happens when 1 billion mobile phone users can play DS-quality games on their phone? Will that not become an important market vs. the ~130 million DS users?

Win Mobile, there are too many things MS does wrong, it's bloated, yet MS puts artificial limits on every OS it does that it sells for less than the current Windows desktop version, fearing that they could cannibalize it if the devices using them become powerful enough to become desktop or notebook replacements, just look at XP for netbooks. Then there is the "look 'n' cheat" factor, Win Mobile has a Windows look, but it can't run Windows apps and even file format interoperability is neither complete nor totally bidirectional, when people know it they think, why bother? Then there is the issue of MS constantly chasing more glamourous competitors, unavoidably looking nerdy and "me too", these are deadly sins in a fashion driven market like the cellphone one.
Add the instability that plagued a lot of versions, tainting the brand. Add that HW producers don't wish that MS gets on their rich market the power it has on the PC one. Add that even people tolerating slowness and bloating on PC's don't tolerate them on cellphones.
There's enough for disaster, and I'm sure I'm still forgetting something.

About keyboards, they had a lot of fans, the only slip I can remember is when MS released one with function keys redefined to have MS SW specific functions as main and their standard ones as secondary, almost everybody, reviewers included, found it insane.

bdbdbd said:
@Mrstickball: I believe Xoj was talking about sales data, not estimates based on web browsing on selected sites.

Firstly, Symbian was supposed to be the standard platform for mobile devices, so the same reasoning you have for Android, goes to Symbian. What you gave as a strength for Android, concerning the carriers, is the weakness Nokia had in US market.

I agree that Symbian is a good competitor in terms of its portability from handset maker to handset maker. But I must ask you - what handset makers use Symbian? Nokia accounts for ~80% of all Symbian sales, so despite the fact that it could be an OS that can be used by any handset, only one company has strongly adopted it.

Having "only one iPhone" isn't excactly the case with iPhone for two reasons:
1. There's more than one model already.
2. Each new iPhone seems to have more powerful hardware than the earlier model. Which makes it no different than the phones running Symbian.

1. There is only 1 model for 1 service provider. Yes, there are models like the 3G and 3GS, but they only sell to one carrier in most regions, as per exclusivity contracts. iPhones are GSM-only, and are tied to exclusive carriers. So, for example, you can't buy an iPhone on Verizon or Sprint. You can't get one on T-Mobile either (but you could jailbreak it for them). Because of this, sales of the iPhone will always be tied in to what carrier offers the phone - whereas any other handset and OS isn't as tied. RIM's BlackBerry is the only phone they sale, but they have BB's on virtually every carrier.

Every downside you can think with Symbian goes with Android as well.

Very true. However, Android does have the advantage of having more handset manufacturers making devices than Symbian does. As I stated earlier, Symbian has 80% of its market share thanks to Nokia, and 20% from everyone else. That is compared to WinMo and Android, which are a bit more varied.

If you don't want to program your games directly to hardware, you can use flash or Java instead, which makes differences in hardware less visible for the developer.

The mobile phone gaming have existed a long time, where you could download the game from the carrier or directly from the publisher. N-Gage wasn't made because Nokia inventing mobile phone gaming with it, but because people were playing games with their mobile phones. And the cheapo-phones do run 2D games.
The centralised marketplace is a new feature, but we are going to have marketplaces by manufacturer, instead of marketplaces by OS, which you were hinting with Android, which leaves iPhone OS as the only OS with centralised marketplace.

Not quite. There is one, and only one Android market place for the ~15 phones that run Android. If a phone does not meet the developer's requirement for hardware, then the game doesn't show up. Otherwise, its the same market place for everyone. I'd suggest you take a look at an Android phone and the content on it. The market is quite robust for every phone.

With all this, i'm not saying that mobile phone gaming wouldn't have its place or it would cease to exist, just that the current growth rate isn't going to continue and it isn't going to end devices like DS or PSP.
The biggest reasons for growth in mobile phone gaming have been the phones capable of playing games becoming more affordable, new entrants in the market and developers waking for mobile phones. But the developer situation isn't any different from the rest of the gaming market, where's growth, there's developers after easy money with their "LOL, casual games" (cheap shovelware) just before getting burned after someone releasing a killer-app, such as a fart simulator. Then the developers choose a new platform to molest after seeing some growth there.

But we come to the question of 'when does the market mature?' most analysts believe the market has a long, LONG ways to go before it maturates and begins to see growth merely tied in to whatever the penetration rate of mobile phones are. There will always be market failures, and the mobile gaming market can and will see those. However, growth will continue at a rate that will entice developers to keep dev'ing for mobiles for quite some time. By 2015, mobile phone gaming is projected to be a $15 billion market. I wonder how close that'll be to what handheld console software sales.

The situation between handheld games devices and smartphones is similar to consoles and PC's. There's a lot bigger audience playing browser based flash games than there is playing games on a videogame console. PC's can even offer you comparable of better gaming experience than a console, but still what were looking here, at this very site, is, how the consoles are doing software- and hardwarewise on the market against each other and the sales are pretty good.

Ah, but there is enough similarity between a smartphone and a handheld console that it'd be very hard to make the distinction between a gaming device and a mobile phone. With consoles/PCs, you don't have that distinction. Both are radically different in their approach to gaming. Whereas my HTC Magic is very similar in form to my Nintendo DS.