People often ask me what OS platform they should use to implement new mobile projects. Market share is an important consideration.

I came across the following interesting graph when looking at the presentations from the recent Symbian Smartphone show. It shows Canalys estimates of sales of each OS platform by region.

With Palm Inc now licensing Microsoft Windows Mobile I expect Windows Mobile will become dominant in North America. Recent statements from Access, who recently acquired PalmSource, suggest that Palm OS will have a limited future. Instead, Access will be focusing on a mobile version of Linux. I expect Linux to eventually enter the non-China markets. However, as mentioned in a previous post on Mobile Linux, there’s lots of work to be done on development tools, deployment tools and applications before it becomes anywhere near as capable as (and a threat to) Symbian OS or Microsoft Windows Mobile.

Note also that the graph only slices the data one way (by OS). Proprietary OSs are ignored as a ‘platform’ which often support J2ME. The J2ME installed base is currently about 708 million handsets (again taken from a Symbian presentation ‘JAVA on Symbian OS’) while the Symbian portion of the above graph is 14.4 million (with 40 million installed base).

The graph came from an interesting Symbian presentation on ‘Engineering with a Business Plan’ which is a good read for any mobile entrepreneur.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Symbian, Mobile, Mobile Linux, Palm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.