If you want to see which handheld platforms are winning the OS war, check out these stats from mobile software store Handango. They released their first-quarter sales results this week, including how many programs were added by operating system - in other words, which operating systems developers are most jamming on right now.
Windows Mobile Pocket PC - 843 adds
Symbian - 825 adds
Windows Mobile Smartphone - 273 adds
Palm OS - 253 adds
RIM - 203 adds
Analysis after the jump.
So what does it all mean? If you want to see the sad decay of the Palm OS platform in numbers, there you have it. Developers, who are looking at potential future sales, don't seem very charged up about poor Palm OS. Now, you could argue that these numbers are low simply because every possible application for Palm OS has already been written, but that feels like a weak argument to me.
Symbian's strong performance is a reminder that the world is not the US; Symbian phones are an oddball curiosity here, but there are an awful lot of them in other countries. RIM is last, but I'm still impressed with them. People seem to be starting to think of Blackberries as flexible smartphones you can add software to, which is a big jump for RIM.
The winner is Windows Mobile. At least here in the US, Microsoft is doing a great job of getting Windows Mobile phones out on all the different carriers, with a variety of form factors and price points. I'd imagine the popularity of these phones - and the flexibility of the OS - is making WM very appealing to developers.
Bonus fact: What are the #1 products that users of various OSes are buying from Handango? For Blackberry, it's a voice dialing program; for Palm OS, an Outlook syncing program, for Symbian an e-mail client, and for Windows Mobile it's MobiTV. What does that say about the OSes and their users?
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May 3, 2007 9:26 PM
I think you're spot on about that RIM argument. For the longest time, I assumed a Blackberry was a device that was either difficult to find applications for, difficult to install applications onto, or not really worth looking into third party apps for, since the RIM suite of apps on each BB seemed complete enough. Now that people are thinking about them more flexibly, I can see it easily overtaking Palm OS in short order.
I'm of two minds on Palm OS though. Palm OS's software catalog is indeed huge, and pretty much every professional utility that you can make for them has been made. Add to that the fact that the only real popular Palm OS devices left are Treo smartphones (alas, poor Handspring - I knew you'd make me proud), there's not much more room for new development.... (and this leads me into my second mind) ...as long as the Palm OS is so stagnant, and the Palm OS is still viewed as a PDA operating system. If the Palm OS could get more smartphone exposure, it might make some more headway. If the Palm OS could get an update, maybe it'd make some more headway. Sadly, I'm worried neither of those will happen, and the Palm OS will go down the tubes along with the PDA market.