News - Android is leading the Chinese smartphone explosion

[HEXUS]

The Chinese smartphone market grew by 200 percent in the past year, with Android grabbing half in that time.

Read more.

[miniyazz]

How did Nokia get so big? They've been losing market share for what seems like years now and still no-one else is anywhere near catching their market penetration

[aidanjt]

The only serious market share they're losing is the smartphone market. 'dumbphones' are still a vast and expanding market, it just doesn't get anywhere as near much hype, partially because it's a lower margin market, and partially because people are stupid.

If Nokia stopped keeping Symbian on life support and let it die naturally, and got MeeGo finished, they could easily start regaining market share. It also would help if they didn't stick to NIH mentality wrt OS choice.

[crossy]

The only serious market share they're losing is the smartphone market. 'dumbphones' are still a vast and expanding market, it just doesn't get anywhere as near much hype, partially because it's a lower margin market, and partially because people are stupid.

Could also be because Nokia "smartphones" are - generally speaking - not that good. Yes, they've had popular models like the N95 but even then there's been a lot of drawbacks. To me at least, later models - like the N97 - have been even less appealing and more compromised.
On the other hand Nokia do seem to have a talent in pushing out dumb phones that just do what you need them for and keep on going. I got a very basic Nokia 2330 (for work) this year and it's very reliable with excellent battery life.

If Nokia stopped keeping Symbian on life support and let it die naturally, and got MeeGo finished, they could easily start regaining market share. It also would help if they didn't stick to NIH mentality wrt OS choice.

Couldn't agree more - Symbian is an idea who's time is past - leave it to the midrange phones and put something else (heck anything else!) on the top end stuff. Last S60 device I had a go at was pretty unusable actually. I'd love to see Nokia do an Android phone - with commitment I think they could turn out something pretty special - but even I realise that this isn't likely.
On the other hand I'm very impressed with Meego. Got v1.1 on my old Acer netbook and it makes Ubuntu Meerkat-UNR look pretty sluggish on the same hardware. Not sure how much of that pizazz would transfer to a phone though - lower powered cpu, smaller screen, etc. Could be interesting to see ...

One thing that does worry me about what the article's saying - if Android is so popular in the PRC, does that mean we're going to see an upswing in the amount of malware for 'droid?
(No xenophobia intended, it's just I remember reading a report that the majority of attacks are now coming out of China)

[aidanjt]

Could also be because Nokia "smartphones" are - generally speaking - not that good.

I don't even think it's the hardware itself which is particularly bad, for e.g. the N900 is pretty slick, Maemo works great for now, and it's pretty much the model phone for MeeGo development, so it'll get that OS first. It's just Symbian, it's horrible, users hate it, developers hate it, everyone hates it. Nokia is shooting itself in the foot by keeping it alive long past sell-by date.