The War Between Symbian OS and Windows Mobile
Trends November 21st. 2005, 1:11amLast week, Symbian announced Symbian OS phones rose 131% in Q3 2005 to reach 8.54 millions. Read the complete announcement at Symbian site. Symbian OS is currently the most popular operating systems for smart phones, and now it has been getting more popular in PDA too.
What I am more interested is the market share of smart phones. Unfortunately, I don’t have the number of market share in Q3 2005. The latest number that I have is the report from Canalys for Q2 2005.
Symbian OS is still dominating the market by more than 60% market share. Microsoft with their Windows Mobile is the runner up with more than 15%. PalmOS from PalmSource has less than 10% market share. After that, we have other operating systems, like Linux.
What is going to happen next year? My feeling says that we will see a war between Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. Why? PalmSource has been bought by a Japanese mobile content provider, called Access. Meanwhile, Palm is jumping into Windows Mobile by announcing Treo 670. It is likely that Palm is going to release more and more Windows Mobile devices.
It would be interesting to see the war between Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. Symbian OS is from Europe and Windows Mobile is from the US. About 80% of Symbian OS devices are from Nokia, which is also European company. What is more interesting; Symbian OS is more popular outside North America, unlike Windows Mobile.
Who will be the winner? Nobody knows. I have tried to list some strong and weak points for each operating system.
Symbian OS:
- [+] Symbian OS is the market leader with large installed based devices. It has been growing very fast too.
- [+] More and more third party applications are developed for Symbian OS. Symbian claims there are already more than 4400 applications for Symbian OS.
- [+] From the technical point of view, Symbian OS, which is originally from EPOC, was developed from the very beginning as the operating system for mobile devices. It is designed for devices with limited processor power, low memory, always on, limited battery power and most importantly always connected.
- [-] Symbian dominates the market is mostly because of Nokia. What is going to happen if Nokia switch to another operating system? We have seen Nokia just released Linux device, Nokia 770.
- [-] The learning curve of Symbian OS is very steep. There are a lot of “strange” concepts in Symbian OS from developer’s point of view, such as active objects and cleanup stack. It might affect the growing number of third party applications.
Windows Mobile:
- [+] No single company dominates Windows Mobile devices, unlike Symbian OS.
- [+] The users, who are familiar with Windows 2000/XP, will feel “at home” when using Windows phones. It is one big advantage.
- [+] We can expect to see third party applications will grow very fast. Windows Mobile has .NET Compact Framework, which make porting applications from PC is very easy.
- [+] Since it is a Microsoft product, it integrates with other Microsoft products very well, for example Office, Outlook and Exchange.
- [-] Windows Mobile is originally an operating system for PC. Although most of Windows Mobile codes are written from scratch, some mobile features are one step behind Symbian OS, for example telephony stack used for voice calling. However, Bill Gates recently said the telephony stack should be better in Windows Mobile 5.0. Another example, the first 3G Symbian OS phone was released about 3 years ago in Japan, while the first 3G Windows Mobile phone was released just last month.
6 Responses to “The War Between Symbian OS and Windows Mobile”
Comments are disabled.
December 19th, 2005 at 1:37 am
[...] Symbian OS is currently the most popular operating systems for smart phones (read also my blog about Symbian OS versus Windows Mobile). The number of third party applications for Symbian OS is growing quite fast too. However, there are many complaints from the developers that Symbian OS development is very difficult. What I mean here is development of native applications using C++ language, not Java applications. [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Windows is a heavy operating system , very demanding on memory, and on processor, to prove it, look how much memory does windows need compared to DOS, look at DOS games and look at the same game if its designed to run under windows xp for example, the windows version will be much bigger, needs a much faster machine, and much more memory. that aint a problem if u r using a laptop or desktop, but on a mobile phone thats a big problem! I think microsoft should work on making their windows mobile, systems smaller, less demanding, and more energy aware if they plan on competing, one last word, I love microsoft products when it comes to laptops, but when it comes to mobile phones, I am a dedicated Nokia user
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:18 am
I have 2 devices, a Windows mobile os Dash, and a Symbian os Nokia 6682. These are my only devices, i don’t have a laptop or pc, between the two mobiles i don’t need one. The Nokia is flexable, easy to use, intuitive, allows 3rd party software, and has a fairly fast processor. The Dash, using Windows Mobile 5, is almost none of the above, but brings a desktop experience to a handheld. If this is Microsoft’s goal, then they’ve succeded, if not, then it’s just a smaller version of the clunky os found in laptops and pc’s.
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm
I use since earlier this year a iPAQ rw6828 with windows mobile 5.1
and more recently a Nokia N958GB with symbian
the windows mobile is painfully slow, needs a reboot every now and then to work properly and has few default features and few default SW or tools installed. All in all it is one of my greatest high$ disappointment of the last many years.
my N958GB however was a true surprise ( I had years before a Nokia 3650 ) and run since 9 yrs Linux for work.
Symbian on my N95 was ultra fast – changing apps, windows, closing / opening apps is many times faster than WIn mobile, the number of tools and applications far beyond expectations. I have all I ever could imagine, from a far much better browsing experience, to all networking methods and tools, 3G, wifi, gprs, etc full set of photo/video support and a really pleasant overall use ( except I miss the touch pad a little )
discovering wifi and connecting for example works much faster using N95/symbian than the boring win mobile.
both devices have been almost exactly same price – with the N95/symbian package doing ALL I expected and the win mobile doing nearly nothing of what I wanted and how I wanted.
my next wish would be a fully featured Linux mobile OS
April 26th, 2008 at 5:28 am
[...] OS is currently the most popular operating systems for smart phones (read also my blog about Symbian OS versus Windows Mobile). The number of third party applications for Symbian OS is growing quite fast too. However, there [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 pm
This might interest Symbian fanboys
1 – Use the screen estate better
You will probably agree that this is due to the lousy QVGA resolution. But even with QVGA, I can’t help but think that the screen estate can be used better, way better. Take for example the messaging, the settings, the gallery. Every option in the OS seems to have a huge icon, with a name next to it. Most of my screen space is blank.
2 – Customizable standby screen
Every single person who has used WM for a while can tell you just how versatile, how useful, how customizable is the Today screen (WM equivalent for standby screen). It’s not a matter of picking which shortcut icons are on display. It’s a matter of which modules or items are displayed. And the modules? They range from the silliest to the most useful: date and clock, calendar, notifications, user ID,… those are the silliest. The most useful? Well, it depends on your needs. Developers can create today plug-ins to applications. You can have a module for displaying shortcuts to your favorite software, another for activating connectivity (BT, IR, WiFi, 3G), another for showing the number of your unread feed items and even displaying some titles, and it goes on and on. comparing the S60 standby to the WM today and anyone can see WM is miles ahead. And that’s just scratching the surface. I have the most unclustered today screen ever, with only 2 raws: SPB Pocket Plus and SPB Mobile Shell and frankly, I can access everything, EVERY SINGLE THING, on my device using only those. I simply forgot how WM operates out-of-the-box. Quite impressive, ain’t it? I would like S60 to let developers access the standby screen. I’d like to be able to customize it to display what I want.
3 – Standardization
Every WM professional (touchscreen) device ships with each function in the same place. If I pick up my friend’s HTC Touch or my trainer’s HTC TyTn II or someone’s iMate Jasjar, and wanted to change the theme, activate bluetooth, launch Word, get Help, I know EXACTLY where to look. If I take my friend’s N73 or my other friend’s N76 or the other’s 6120, it will take me a while to find my way around the menu. Even out-of-the-box. If you owned 2 S60 devices, you’d know what I am talking about. For God’s sake, the N95 had 2 Media folders in different places! I beg you S60, stop the non-sense. Follow one configuration, and by one, I mean One, Une, Uno, Wahida, and if that’s not good enough, I can get you a translation in each language on earth. From my experience with devices so far, I think the Nokia 6120 has the best menu layout: it is the one that makes most sense except for the My Own folder that should be named Applications.
Talking about standardization, we need some standard menu heights in S60. The standby screen has one height, the menu another, applications another. It’s crazy!
4 – Automatic Access Point
Pretty simple. Once I connect over WiFi on WM5, it doesn’t ask me what access point i would like to use in every single connectivity demanding application, over and over and over and over… That’s not smartphone-like, that’s dumbphone. Just stick to the access point I am using. And if I am on wap, gprs, 3g, tell me there’s another viable option around, like WiFi.
5 – Get the connection from my computer
When I connect my WM device to a laptop or computer that has an on-going internet connection, the connection is routed to my device. And best of all, it doesn’t ask me questions, doesn’t need settings, it just works, out-of-the-box.
6 – Gimme shortcuts
On WM, when I press Options, I get a list of actions with one letter underlined (on qwerty based devices) or one number underlined (on 12key devices), pretty much like the menus in Microsoft Windows. If I press the underlined key, the device performs the action. No need to scroll up or down. Simple and efficient.
7 – Start on boot
In WM, like on the desktop, there’s a Startup folder where you can put shortcuts to all applications that you want to launch when the device boots. It’s splendid. I can choose which built-in apps don’t launch and which 3rd party software do. S60 needs to give the user the option to do that himself without having to rely on a developer’s generosity to implement it in the software.
8 – Contacts look-up improvement
It’s Adam from pocketnow who opened my eyes to this. Apparently when you start typing on a WM standby, it opens the contacts but looks them up in a T9 way. For example, if you type “2? it will look for contacts with a name/family name with an a, b or c. If you type 23, it will look for those with da, db, dc, ea, eb, ec, fa, fb and fc. You get the picture. It works the same way as SkeyQuiKey. I would love to see it implemented in S60 itself.
9 – Tell me my free RAM
In WM, I have access to see my free RAM. Why don’t I on S60? This is a major performance booster. Plus I would love to see ALL my running software, and not just those that kindly appear when I press the menu button for a while. Like for example, why don’t the Log, Gallery, Music Player, Contacts, show in there as running, when they show up in any other task manager?
10 – Let me choose what folders load in Gallery
The picture viewer in WM functions the same way the file explorer does, which means it will only display the My Pictures folder, when it’s first opened, showing the pictures and videos captured by the built-in camera. But I can navigate through my real folders in order to see what images are kept in these. That’s the way it should be, I think, in S60. If not, let me pick some “banned” folders, which images are not displayed in the gallery.
Bonus – 11 – Profession-axed software
I have said it, over and over again. S60 needs to be recognized as a professional operating system. That would mean getting profession-axed software : engineering, medical, law, graphic design,… Just for example, there’s a mobile version of Autocad for WM, that’s the software engineers use. When profession-axed software are available for S60, it will get a wider adoption. Not having this acknowledgment now is, in my sincere point of view, the major thing holding S60 back. Many of you will probably disagree.
These are the 11 improvements I believe S60 could use in order to achieve better user experience. What do you think? Is there anything you’d like to add to the list, or retrieve? Do you believe any of those will ever make it to S60, and if so, do you believe it’s due in the near future? Or will my grandchildren one day come to me and say “look, granny, I can see my free RAM! I bet that’s something you couldn’t do!”.