Symbian is still ahead of Android says Gartner, 37.6% vs 22.7% in 2010

Gartner have released a report that shows Nokia is still ahead of Android. This as you will know WILL NOT be reported by the major US blogs because it’s PRO Nokia. I stand corrected. It’s on Engadget. But still,the general report around the internet will be that Android is the number 1 mobile OS world wide. This won’t get the same traction as Android toppling Symbian around the blogs.

Now, for many of you, the fact Symbian is ahead isn’t news as many disputed Canalys’ initial report.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1543014

It may be an inevitability that Android overtakes Symbian, but right now, according to Gartner, Symbian is still on top. That’s despite it being pretty much NOKIA versus every other manufacturer trying to be “different” with Android.

Seemingly hard to swallow for Gartner:

Symbian’s market share dropped further in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 32.6 percent or 32.6 million units. This allowed Android to overtake Nokia’s Symbian unit sales during the fourth quarter of 2010. However, the Symbian OS is also used by Fujitsu and Sharp as well as in legacy products from Sony Ericsson and Samsung. “This aggregated volume kept Symbian slightly ahead of Android,” said Ms. Cozza.

37.6% VS 22.7%. Yes, somewhat “slightly” ahead. You know if this was the other way around we’d have this as Android thrashing Symbian.

Cheers to fahoum for the heads up.

This is a post written by Eugene aka The_Ultimate111 after the initial Canalys report. It’s about 10 days old but still quite relevant, especially after this report from Gartner:

False Alarm again or Symbian has still the throne.

We live in the times of headlines, if it’s like everybody got illiterate again as it was 3 centuries ago. There areal so much news these days so we eat them easily, almost having no doubts.

But what if someone is abusing headlines for his own good? Do you remember the story when GfK reported that Android overtook Symbian in Asia? Oh it is a remarkable one! GfK stated that Android overtook Symbian “in the context of Asia as a whole”. But there was a great note in that report: North Asia refers to Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea and Taiwan. Wait a minute, what? Everybody who knows geography understands, that Hong Kong is not a state, Macau and Taiwan are not independent states too! So how responsible to write that? It’s just a joke, recent days people were fired with dishonour for such misrepresentation! But it seemed okay with GfK, and with Google, obviously not so much interested in fair competition.

There was a second part – Southeast Asia refers to Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Most intriguing part is that according to that report there was no overtaking in Southeast Asia (in there narrow understanding). So where Android was actually winning? In South Korea! What a surprise to win in the homeland of Samsung, LG and Pantech!

But wait, here comes the funniest part! “Total Asia covers both North Asia and Southeast Asia” Whaaat? So total “Asia” doesn’t include China and India? Wait, I need to check if I’m reading the map wrong. No it’s still ok; China and India are still in Asia! Oh, there is also Laos, Indonesia, Sri-Lanka, Kuala Lumpur, Pakistan and many other countries that somehow where not good enough to get into “ total Asia” for GfK.

But it’s not so cool to come with a headline stating – Android overtook Symbian in South Korea, it’s simply not so impressing! So how one must act? Just publish your report and state the facts, don’t make informational frauds!

It’s not how things work nowadays! Everyone wants to get into RSS – nobody will download the damn PDF and read, that “Asia” in GfK terms is a huge geographical misrepresentation. Nor will do a blatant US blog (it seems they don’t know geography). The same thing  with twitter and facebook. A catchy headline is just enough to get into 140 and to celebrate an #epicwin! with your classmates!

So was that a single abuse? No it’s just getting bigger. Now Canalys was running with a red flag, screaming that Android overtook Symbian in Q4 2010 (we are not even speaking about a year, just about a quarter). And what happens next? Famous analyst, Tomy Ahonen, which is one of most prominent and responsible people on the market made a simple double check of this info. (read it yourself here ).

So he checked the numbers with all available info on the market (including all data from vendors), then triple checked and it appears, that there were just 25.4 mln Android devices shipped in Q4 2010. Okay let’s give it a 10% error of magnitude, as Tomy suggests, but it will be only 28 mln devices. Nokia delivered 31 mln Symbian devices. So here we go again, actually it was a little bit early to stand under the sign “Mission accomplished”.

One thing, that Tomy didn’t say, but was pointed out by others, is that no one of these stat counting agencies doesn’t even try to count Symbian devices produced in Japan. Yes, maybe someone has forgotten, but Fujitsu and Sharp are actually producing big volumes of Symbian devices to the Japanese market, but they are never included into global Symbian marketshare.

So what we see is a coming of age of irresponsible journalism and irresponsible analysis. It’s not about reporting checked or accurate news or stats, it’s just about delivering catchy headlines and get the traffic. Many sites are actually abusing your trust delivering false information and feeling no responsibility for that! Let’s not tolerate that.

Category: Nokia