Misleading or just poorly emphasised?

I was just reading an HTML 5 Cheat sheet by Nick Heath on Silicon.com which makes the following comment on page 2:

“Today the iPhone OS, the world's third most popular mobile OS”

Why focus on the iPhone when Symbian leads by miles? The only reasons I can think of to justify this is that the iPhone buzz is so high (but I’m guessing higher than demand otherwise after a few years in the market it would be above Blackberry in the market share stakes, even if that is a gap it is closing), or that we assume iPhone users are more active users of browsing web sites than Symbian owners. That’s probably true, but still it leaves me shaking my head at this comment.

Read their own link the numbers are actually quite interesting:

• Symbian 46.9% Market share
• Blackberry 19.9%
• iPhone OS 14.4%
• Windows Mobile 8.7%
• Android 3.9%

The iPhone OS is the fastest growing OS, absolutely, but it’s exactly due to this kind of largely (IMHO) unwarranted focus that people think Apple are the only player in town. Likewise Android which has less than half the sales of WinMo, but 1000 times the buzz.

While Apple and, to a lesser extent Android uptake is on the rise, Symbian commands a huge lead. Time will tell if they can hold onto this, but I can see why they might be taking their time getting new UI enhancements and other improvements out of the door, they have plenty of breathing space.

I honestly hope Symbian have something awesome out soon, however even if they do I know it will be largely ignored by the press, Symbian just isn’t exciting enough to write about. Well, not at the moment.

I’m surprised Windows Mobile is at 8.7%, I thought nobody used it, certainly not the almost 1 in 10 (or more accurately almost 9 in 100) reported in these figures. Of course by the time version 7 is released this will be a fair bit smaller as some people will hold off buying until the new OS arrive. Similarly though, I expect some will rush out and buy “classic” devices in order to run their current apps.

I want to see reviews of the final Windows 7 OS, it may not be an upgrade path for me, it largely depends on how they pitch the development tools as much as anything. I wasn’t, for example, happy that the Professional version of Visual Studio 2008 didn’t directly support smart device development (under which Windows Mobile/Phone is classified).

If Microsoft add smart device development to the lower versions of Visual Studio 2010 (yes, probably even the free Express versions) then you’ll end up with more active developers leading to more applications being developed and arriving more quickly, which is what a new OS will be crying out for. If Microsoft don’t do this then it will be a sadly missed opportunity, and in my opinion a stumbling block for acceptance.

Hell, you can even write for their XBox360 console using Visual Studio Express.

Yes, I want free tools. I don’t want to go looking for these in another OS (I was writing stuff for Symbian in their free development studio not so long ago), but I may be tempted to move if the need arises.