Symbian maintained its status as Europe’s leading smartphone platform in July 2010 despite losing significant marketshare, according to comScore MobiLens data.
Apple Gains on Symbian
In the EU5 nations of UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Symbian held 54.4% smartphone platform marketshare with 33.08 million subscribers. Although Symbian’s total number of subscribers rose 11.7% from 29.6 million, marketshare dropped 20.9% from 68.8% a year earlier. The total number of EU5 smartphone subscribers grew 41% in that timeframe, from 43.05 million to 60.85 million.
Apple has been the main beneficiary of Symbian’s loss of platform marketshare. Between July 2009, when the Apple platform held 10.2% marketshare, that figure has risen 88.2% to 19.2% in July 2010. Apple’s total EU5 smartphone subscriber base increased 165% in that period, from 4.4 million to 11.68 million.
While it is ranked fifth, the Google platform has also undergone dramatic subscriber growth between July 2009, when it had 208,000 EU5 smartphone subscribers, and July 2010, when it had 3.71 million subscribers. This represents 1,686% subscriber growth. Market share grew about 400%, from 0.5% to 6.1%.
Apple Also Gains on Nokia
Apple also made impressive year-over-year gains as a smartphone OEM among EU5 subscribers between July 2009 and July 2010. Leading OEM Nokia produced similar results to Symbian in the platform market, losing significant marketshare while gaining users.
Nokia’s smartphone marketshare dropped 21.9%, from 65.6% to 51.2%. Total subscribers grew 10.3%, from 28.26 million to 31.17 million. Meanwhile, Apple, the only major smartphone platform provider in the EU5 market to also serve as an OEM, produced the same results. No other OEM produced major year-over-year changes in its marketshare/audience figures.
UK Leads in Many Mobile Activities
Among the EU5 market as a whole, sending text messages was the most popular mobile activity in July 2010, with 82.5% of mobile subscribers sending at least one text. No other activity came close to the popularity of texting; application use (including games) followed in a distant second place with 35.7% mobile subscriber reach.
The UK had the highest usage rate of any individual EU5 nation for most of the mobile activities tracked by comScore. The UK had the highest national rates for every activity except music, where Spain and Germany both had higher usage rates.
The UK displayed rates far higher than the EU5 average or any other country in social networking/blogging (24.6% compared to 15.3% overall), accessing news and information (37.1% compared to 29.9% overall) and browser usage (37.4% compared to 26.2% overall).
In total, 26.4% of EU5 mobile subscribers use a smartphone and 45.3% are 3G network subscribers. By individual nation, the highest usage rates for these two mobile phone options are in Italy (34.1%) and Spain (56%), respectively.
Mobile Music Rises in EU5
The total number of mobile music users in the EU5 countries of Europe has grown 10% in the last year, according to other recent comScore MobiLens data. There were 54 million mobile music users in the EU5 nations of UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain during the three-month average ending March 2010. This represents a 10% increase from the three-month average ending March 2009.
