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by HelloMcFly 4653 days ago
I skipped over the BRICS part, but it doesn't change the equation. Anyway meaningful way you slice it Nokia was "way behind", even if they still had a legacy in a few markets that primarily used dumb phones (or "feature phones").

I couldn't find BRICS-specific numbers or I would post them too, but I'd like to see any reputable source that they had anything close to a 60% marketshare in a non-dumbphone category.

Edit: Found this link for China. Hard to believe the the other countries would swing the shift so dramatically. http://www.phonearena.com/news/In-China-Android-is-blowing-a...
1 comments
speeder 4653 days ago
I could not find all my numbers again.

Also remember that mid-2011 Symbian manufacturing stopped (thus all new sales at the end of the year were of old phones already shipped).

Yet from your own link, it states that Symbian still was ahead of iOS.

Anyway, I DO have numbers from Brazil: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/android-smartphone-sales-le...

(some other numbers I had were also from Kantar, unfortunately their site is TERRIBLE)

Note that in 2012 Brazil STILL HAD 22% of new Smartphones being Symbian.

Also, several other countries in 2011 still had some good Symbian numbers (like first or second place).

Suddenly stopping selling Symbian to switch to WP7 made no sense, even worse when claimed it was to make it different (when other manufacturers ALSO made WP7 phones).

I just wish I could find the 2010 and 2011 numbers for all the BRICS again, but today that is seemly very hard :(

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HelloMcFly 4653 days ago
I think what I take issue with is referring to any device running a Symbian OS as a "smart phone". Many Symbian phones were just "feature phones", and this is probably (though I can't prove it) especially true in BRICS countries. It's not really a fair comparison. We've got little reason to believe Nokia's fate would have been any different in those markets as they developed than it was anywhere else.

Plus, did you ever use an actual Symbian smart phone? I used this one for a bit (http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/nokia-e7-dark-gray/4505-...) and it was just terrible. And it was probably one of the top 5 best Symbian models!

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speeder 4653 days ago
My family owned several of them.

We really liked them... Powerful enough to play a J2ME port of Counter-Strike but affordable.

iOS is still beyond 90% of the population income or somehing like that.

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