June 6 2003
 

Shipments of Symbian handsets will reach 100 million phones worldwide in 2007, according to Ovum, the analyst and consulting company. This compares with a predicted 22 million shipments for Microsoft Smartphone OS.

But although this will make Symbian the world's leading smartphone platform, shipping on 14 percent of all handsets that year, it will not guarantee platform ownership for Symbian.

"Contrary to popular belief, the biggest threat currently facing Symbian is not Microsoft," says Jessica Figueras, senior analyst with Ovum. "It is the long-running debate over what Symbian is fundamentally for."

Symbian must ultimately serve the needs of its licensees - without their  buy-in it has no future to speak of. But the device vendors who own and license Symbian are finding it hard to agree on whether a standard platform for application development is more or less important than the ability to differentiate their products from each other.

This long-running tension at the heart of the Symbian enterprise is creating dangerous fragmentation in the Symbian platform which will seriously affect its chances of staying relevant. Fragmentation raises the barriers to entry for mobile application developers, who already face a minefield when it comes to mobile platforms.

"Faced with fragmentation, mobile developers will almost certainly focus their efforts on one or two platforms which allow them to address a large audience with the minimum of effort," says Figueras.

"This will provoke a natural selection amongst platforms: those which offer the best "effort/audience" ratio will attract the most applications. Luckily for Symbian one of these is likely to be Nokia's Series 60 user interface for Symbian, which offers both the promise of basic application compatibility and a large addressable market. Such is Nokia's clout in the devices market, that it could probably ensure Symbian's success in the numbers game all by itself."

But Microsoft will also benefit from Symbian's failure to create a unified platform standard. Ovum believes that the strength of its mobile story for developers will create a virtuous circle of application availability, which is bound to attract a small hard core of power users.

This is the basis on which Ovum expects Microsoft Smartphone OS to achieve around three percent of global handset shipments in 2007. "This is certainly not a win in the  numbers game, but in its niche Microsoft has a better chance of platform
ownership than Symbian does at present," says Figueras.
 

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