A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

It's easy to forget just how different the customs of other nations are. While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them. In England, we gurn; and in Spain, they throw tomatoes. We're a world of completely disparate customs -- yet somehow we can't fathom that Nokia and the Symbian OS could be ahead of Apple and Google in the smartphone market.

It's really quite crazy. It's like everyone is just ignoring that huge, 40% slice of the pie that says "SYMBIAN." Seriously, if you read more than one or two tech blogs, you're led to believe that the iPhone dominates the smartphone market, with Android pulling ahead, or nipping at its heels, depending on which statistics you read. Who uses a BlackBerry, anyway? And Nokia... Nokia... hmm... that name rings a bell...

Now, take a look at China, which now has over 400,000,000 users on the Internet. As of June 2010, it also has 277,000,000 mobile Internet users, and almost all of those are Nokia/Symbian OS users. The chart above comes from a recent study by iResearch, and it shows that 65% of mobile Internet users visit the Nokia OVI store, and 58% visit the China Mobile-operated Mobile Market.

The point I'm trying to make is that, if you look beyond the continual PR orgies that Android and iOS enjoy, the world view is very different. If you look beyond your normal news sources, beyond your comfort zone and national borders, you will see that Nokia is a very serious contender indeed.

A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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