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bdbdbd said:
@Mrstickball: Thanks for the info about Android marketplace. I knew Android has standard features, but never thought marketplace would be one.
Android market place is a pretty interesting thing. It shares the most similarities with the iTunes distribution network that the iPhone uses, as it tends to leverage more software to more phones.
One note is that the individual carriers *do* have their own content distribution systems, but it is always inside the Android market. For example, when you click on the Android market on a T-Mobile phone (like mine), it comes up with 3 areas - Apps, Games, and T-Mobile products. The T-Mo products are carrier-specific, but the rest of the market is leveraged and acts like it always has (the T-Mo products area is very new, maybe 5 days old). Other carriers will do the same shortly, which may help leverage more product sales as they want to promote earnings of their apps, too.
The reason why Nokia accounts so much for Symbian sales, is because Nokia sells so many phones with Symbian. At the moment Symbian is the most common mobile phone OS in the market.
And the reason why other Symbian manufacturers are looking elsewhere, is because of getting beaten by Nokia in terms of competing with Symbian phones. If someone is beating others with Android and it doesn't provide the results they wanted, the manufacturers look elsewhere again.
The strength Symbian has at the moment is, that it has a strong supporter behind it.
I agree that Nokia using Symbian is very important to both Nokia's smartphone ambitions, as well as Symbian's OS proliferation. But on the same end, I wonder if it will be beneficial to Symbian as a market leader, because the other handset makers are going elsewhere like Android. If it comes to the point it is everyone vs. Nokia and Symbian, I will pick everyone as I think Nokia's marketshare will eventually erode over time as other handset makers improve their offerings.
At the same time the mobile phone games market is growing, the handheld gaming market is growing too, if i'm not mistaken. The growth of mobile phone gaming is irrelevant in the context, if it doesn't happen at the expense of handheld systems.
Yes, the handheld market is growing as well. However, mobile gaming's growth is outstripping handheld console growth. If that trend continues, then we may see cannibalization of handheld gaming. My whole argument is that, eventually, handheld gaming will go fully digital distribution, and leverage mobile carriers to provide bandwidth. I could invision a future where Nintendo and Sony leverage their products on more platforms as a means to break out into larger sales. God only knows what'd happen if Nintendo offered a virtual console for Symbian, Android, iTunes or BlackBerries.....Could you imagine an install base of 500 million people possibly buying a Mario game?
Despite the similarities of the systems, in the end it turns to what kind of games are available and game specific devices have the advantage of being designed for the games on the system, while smartphones has to be designed to perform multiple tasks. You can make a games phone like the N-Gage, but outside of it not being good with games to begin with, it was horrible in other aspects.
As the hardware improves on the phones, I think that we'll see pretty decent gaming uses for the phones. Although the phone does require system resources for other tasks (calls, ect), developers could easily require the handset to turn off resources to other applications - for example, I can turn off everything but games on my Android phone via an Airplane mode for single player games, which allows for much more optimized gaming.
And as time goes on, we'll see exactly what kind of games do get made for the phones. So far, a decent amount of the content has been made by smaller developers. But as word spread that the phones could make big money, larger devs are taking a crack at development. We'll start to see what kind of content can be made for cells. But I imagine that, given what some phones are capable of, we'll see some great games. Heck, Rockstar is doing a Grand Theft Auto for the iPhone.
I wouldn't call it shrinking, if a company isn't losing in sales. Though, it's not growing either.
If the entire market is growing, then its market share is shrinking. For example, Nokia (as per Gartner) shipped slightly more phones, while the market grew by about 7%. That would mean that its market share decreased.
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