Most popular mobile operating systems

[rpm]

Most popular mobile operating systems

Symbian is still top of the pile but Apple's Mac OS X is storming up the popularity charts.

 

[dj_jyno]

I think that Symbian will hold on to the highest market share for quite a while, considering the volume of Nokia smartphones being sold every month. Samsung is also giving Symbian numbers a boost with some of their most recent phones.

Of all the OSs mentioned, Symbian is arguably the most mature one, designed with phones in mind from the ground up. Windows Mobile has been around a bit longer, but took a while to migrate from being PDA-centric to smartphones. For sheer speed vs. CPU speed and power consumption, nothing can quite match Symbian.

iPhone OS will never have a large marker share due to its exclusivity to the iPhone. It has a few nifty features like good touch integration, but seriously needs to improve on things like multitasking and include features included as standard on all other smartphones (I've noted that iPhone 3.0 will address some of these issues).

 

[km2]

Of all the OSs mentioned, Symbian is arguably the most mature one, designed with phones in mind from the ground up. Windows Mobile has been around a bit longer, but took a while to migrate from being PDA-centric to smartphones. For sheer speed vs. CPU speed and power consumption, nothing can quite match Symbian.

WM and Symbian/EPOC both came about the same time and both started with a PDA focus (Symbian with the old Psion handheld computers, Microsoft with those old HP Jornada(?) PDAs with full keyboard). Microsoft has just sat on their bum for so long without actually giving the system a full overall, while Symbian has advanced pretty significantly. You compare an old Pocket PC device with a WM6.1 device and while the applications have bumped up quite a lot with full Exchange support etc, the operating system feels and looks pretty much the same.

I popped open my Psion 5MX a few days ago, and despite it having only a 32MHz processor it can still thump the HTC TyTN with a 400 MHz processor in just feeling fast. Symbian/EPOC really did get that right, even though it's a nightmare to program.

Of course I think the iPhone showed us that you don't have to design your operating system from the ground up towards a phone to still make a great product. It's not like there's any technical reasons that the iPhone OS can't support full multitasking in the same way that Windows Mobile does, it's just an Apple decision to cripple it till they feel ready to roll it out. Symbian has an advantage with their proper real-time kernel which gives much finer control of power saving. It's also cheaper to build Symbian devices because their real-time OS means you only need one CPU instead of the typical arrangement of one CPU for the radio/baseband and another for the PDA part.

I think the real OS in danger is WM. Microsoft's big advantage before was excellent Exchange integration, but now just about every mobile OS supports Exchange. Their actual OS is stuck in a 2002 time warp. Hopefully Microsoft can get their act together with Windows Mobile 7, but they've delayed it so often I worry it's going to slip from 2010 to 2011+.

 

[spykoss]

Tryn to get the guys at Microsoft to undastand being market leader isn't a job description but rather a title - its not guaranteed.

They've been playing catch-up in recent in most of their products i.e. Virtual PC, I.E 7, Windows 7, and nw its gona be WM?

Don't they get tired of being showed the future of computing? Or have they run out of ideas?

Gone are the days when the world looked up to MS for innovation..

 

[dj_jyno]

WM and Symbian/EPOC both came about the same time and both started with a PDA focus

True, I forgot about Symbian's EPOC roots for a moment there

I popped open my Psion 5MX a few days ago, and despite it having only a 32MHz processor it can still thump the HTC TyTN with a 400 MHz processor in just feeling fast. Symbian/EPOC really did get that right, even though it's a nightmare to program.

Considering that the average user will not write their own apps for these devices, I think that the speed advantage outweighs the increased complexity in programming.

It's not like there's any technical reasons that the iPhone OS can't support full multitasking in the same way that Windows Mobile does, it's just an Apple decision to cripple it till they feel ready to roll it out.

It does put the Apple at a disadvantage for the time being, though, since that is one of the selling points of smartphones. Remember the "Windows Mobile on an iPhone" video?

I think the real OS in danger is WM.

It does seem like it. The bottom line is that WM will be safe until the manufacturers decide to switch to Symbian/Android/whatever, or the manufacturers pre-installing WM lose a significant market share.