Trends Hut

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This Article is written by Christina Warren
Gartner has released a report predicting that by 2014, Android will be second only to Symbian in mobile operating system marketshare worldwide, with the two platforms accounting for nearly 60% of the mobile OS market within the next four years. The news follows numerous recent bullish reports on the state of Android in the U.S.

We don’t see many devices running on Nokia’s Symbian platform in the U.S., save a few feature phones here and there. In the rest of the world, however, Symbian remains the dominant mobile OS, in part because it is open source and can be used on devices at various price points....
Gartner expects manufacturers to take a similar approach with Android with budget Android-based devices coming to market from manufacturers like Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola. In other words, in addition to the Droid X  and Galaxy S devices we see today, manufacturers will also be releasing low-cost Android devices that are probably more similar to feature phones than smartphones.
On its face, Gartner’s predictions make a lot of sense. We agree that open source platforms are likely to dominate the global mobile landscape, especially as more and more phone makers shift to a smartphone OS of some type.

However, we do question Gartner’s prediction that even in 2014, Symbian will be at 30.2% market share. As it stands, Nokia is moving away from Symbian on most of its flagship phones, focusing on MeeGo instead. As a platform, Symbian may retain a huge userbase but developer interest and innovation in the space just isn’t there.
Additionally, while there will still be markets where offering a fully featured smartphone isn’t economically viable, consumers and users from all over the world are demanding more from their devices, not less. It’s hard to imagine that in four years time, the Symbian platform will still exist in its current form and that device makers will want to use it.
We’d place our bets on a highly customized low-end Android stack taking over the bottom of the world market, with the higher tier smartphone market still at play amongst the big players like iOS, Android, RIM and the upcoming Windows Phone 7.
Four years is a long time in mobile phone years; we’ll just have to see how accurate these predictions prove to be in the future.