{"id":2841,"date":"2011-02-02T21:31:16","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T21:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2011\/02\/02\/android-now-single-biggest-smart-phone-platform"},"modified":"2025-10-07T23:28:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T22:28:50","slug":"android-now-single-biggest-smart-phone-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2011\/02\/02\/android-now-single-biggest-smart-phone-platform","title":{"rendered":"Android now single biggest smart phone platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Android Topples Symbian in Q4 2010<\/a><\/p>\n

These figures show that Android (which includes two variants, OMS and Tapas) narrowly sold more units than any other individual platform for the first time last quarter, pulling ahead of Nokia’s Symbian for the first time. I was surprised that Symbian was the close second, as having been to one of Kingston’s mobile phone shops and asked them which phones they had ran Symbian, they couldn’t tell me. Still, Nokia remains the only company still producing phones that do; the others have all dumped it and started producing Android phones.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Despite being only a little over halfway through my current contract, I’m already keeping a watch on the market. Both Symbian and Android have one important disadvantage compared to Apple’s iPhone: you can’t actually go into a store and try one out. To be fair, when I try an iPhone I always notice what’s not there compared to my phone (such as being able to long-press a letter on the touch-screen and get a number or a common punctuation mark), but that wouldn’t occur to someone who hasn’t used a smartphone before. Before I got my phone, I was able to try one out in the Kingston T-Mobile store, but they no longer offer that, just a dummy unit with a picture of the home screen. You can try out a Samsung Galaxy Tablet in both Phones4u and PC World, but neither offer internet access, unlike the Apple Store, which means you can’t see it display a website or download and try apps with it. Android has clear price advantages over the iPhone, including being available on contract, but the iPhone has the “try before you buy” advantage anywhere there is an Apple Store.<\/p>\n

I’ve finally ordered a bigger battery (as mine seems to be running out of juice even more rapidly than before) and bought a few books on programming Android although I’ve been a bit lazy about sitting down and actually learning from them. I started learning to program Qt in 2003 back when KDE looked promising (I’ve lost a lot of interest in it now that both KDE and Symbian are losing ground) and there was a certain moment when the light-bulb went on in my head and I got the hang of programming it. Now, it’s a more or less new language for me (it’s a while since I did anything with Java) and a different way of working compared with Qt. I need work-through examples which actually work; the first two books I bought both had examples that were incomplete, or referred to things which aren’t there. So, the “light-bulb” moment has yet to happen for me here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Android Topples Symbian in Q4 2010 These figures show that Android (which includes two variants, OMS and Tapas) narrowly sold more units than any other individual platform for the first time last quarter, pulling...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[794],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-JP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2841"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41496,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions\/41496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}