Apple also grew in market share during the last quarter, and by nearly as much. In September Apple had 27.4% of the smartphone market. Apple’s market share grew 2.2%, hitting 29.6% in December.

Of course, with Apple and Android getting a collective surge of nearly five percentage points, someone has to have lost out. Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, the big loser appears to have been RIM. Their BlackBerry platform went into the quarter with a market share of 18.9%. By December they had lost 2.9% – more than either Apple or Android gained – to bottom out at 16%. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Symbian suffered smaller drops, finishing December at 4.7% and 1.4% market share, respectively.

ComScore also collected data about mobile phone OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Apple gained 2.2 percentage points and ended December with a market share of 12.4% of all mobile phones, not just smartphones. That leaves Apple in fourth place, after Samsung, LG, and Motorola. RIM maintained its fifth place position. Of the top five mobile phone manufacturers, Apple was the only OEM to actually gain market share during the September-December period. Samsung held steady at 25.3%, while LG, Motorola, and RIM all lost market share.

Finally, comScore looked at mobile content usage (i.e., activities other than making phone calls) across all mobile subscribers, not just smartphone users. The most popular activity by far is texting, with 74.3% of users saying they had used their phone to send text messages. The second most popular activity at 47.6% was downloading mobile apps, followed very closely by using their phone’s browser at 47.5%. Just over two thirds – 35.3% said they used their phone to access social networking sites or blogs, while 31.4% played games and 23.8% listened to music. All of these activities gained in popularity in December. Downloading apps saw the biggest jump in popularity at just over 5%.

[via comScore]

Remarkably, most of this growth has come after Nokia’s decision to re-release Symbian under an open source-like license, a decision which followed shortly after the company’s choice of Windows Phone as its “primary smartphone strategy.” Thus while Symbian’s global market share remains strong, Nokia’s committment to the platform appears less so, leaving the future of the world’s single most popular operating system in doubt.

While perhaps not entirely unexpected, as Engadget points out Samsung hinted at such a move last year, it is interesting timing. Symbian has recently revamped its OS. 

Marketers may want to take note of the decreased support of Symbian. Recent research from Smaato indicated that Symbian beats all other mobile operating systems when it comes to ads clicked. 

"Symbian and Feature Phones continue to perform well with a CTR Index of 130 (145 in July) and 120 (118 in July) respectively," the company says. "RIM passes Android in performance, with its strongest month since Smaato’s metrics began. Apple overtook Windows Phone, as it fell by almost half from 98 in July to 58. The Index consists of the average CTR of all devices and this number is set to 100." 

"Symbian remains the leading OS in both regions [USA and Europe] as Windows Phone and Android both dropped by around 40% in the US (Windows 153 in July 80 in August. Android 103 in July to 60)," says Smaato. "In Europe, Windows Phone and Android dropped in performance, but while Windows remains the second best OS, Android fell to last place."

That research comes from a company that serves over 16 billion ad requests from over 7,000 publishers over 50 ad networks. 

A couple weeks ago, Nokia announced a new family of smartphones powered by Symbian. 

Depending on how well these devices sell, this could mean good things for the future of the Symbian platform, which itself has been greatly updated. This could also mean good things for marketers, as stats from Smaato indicate that the Symbian beats all other mobile operating systems when it comes to ads clicked (via Wired). Smaato serves over 16 billion ad requests from over 7,000 publishers and over 50 mobile ad networks.  

"Symbian and Feature Phones continue to perform well with a CTR Index of 130 (145 in July) and 120 (118 in July) respectively," the company says. "RIM passes Android in performance, with its strongest month since Smaato’s metrics began. Apple overtook Windows Phone, as it fell by almost half from 98 in July to 58. The Index consists of the average CTR of all devices and this number is set to 100."

"Symbian remains the leading OS in both regions [USA and Europe] as Windows Phone and Android both dropped by around 40% in the US (Windows 153 in July 80 in August. Android 103 in July to 60)," says Smaato. "In Europe, Windows Phone and Android dropped in performance, but while Windows remains the second best OS, Android fell to last place."

Smaato co-founder Harald Neidhardt told Wired’s Ryan Singel he could only speculate on the CTR differences among operating systems. A couple guesses he made were related to displays and demographics. 

Whatever the case may be, if the numbers are indicative of the big picture, more advanced Symbian phones in more users’ hands would appear to be a good thing for mobile marketers moving forward. They would also appear to suggest marketers have a ways to go for effectiveness on other operating systems. 

Read our interview with Trumpia’s Tim Nguyen for some mobile marketing tips.

The latest version of Symbian comes with over 250 new features such as HDMI support, multiple personalized home screens, multipoint touch, multitasking and "turbo charged" graphics.

"We are thrilled that Nokia, the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer, continues to recognize the power of the Symbian platform and has chosen it to run on four of the company’s hottest new smartphones," says 

Daniel Rubio, Leadership Team member for Technology and Delivery Management at Symbian. "It is very rewarding to see the Symbian^3 platform brought to life so faithfully on these devices, providing compelling experiences at a range of price points that will make them accessible and appealing to users around the world."

The three devices mentioned join the previously announced Nokia N8 in the Nokia smartphone family. 

"Today our fight back to smartphone leadership shifts into high gear," said Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Markets, Nokia. "Despite new competition, Symbian remains the most widely used smartphone platform in the world. Our new family of smartphones introduced today feature the all-new Symbian OS, rewritten to be faster, easier to use, more efficient and more developer friendly." 

In fact, Nokia announced some improvements in developer tools, such as significant enhancements to the Nokia Qt software development kit (which the company says results in 70% reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for the phones), improvements in the Ovi Store user experience, and a lower barrier of entry and increased monetization opportunities for developers (like free Java and Symbian signing, in-app purchase, improved revenue share, and advanced analytics). 

Savander also commented on the anticipation for the Nokia N8, saying, "Based on the level of consumer interest and the highest online pre-orders in Nokia history, we expect big things from the Nokia N8."

TechCrunch is reporting that Apple may be adding another patent infringement lawsuit against HTC. These two companies already have suits against each other.

Fortune points to a Piper Jaffray report indicating that the App Store accounts for about 1% of Apple’s gross profit.

A report from SMobile Systems suggests that about 20% of Android Apps "grant a third party application access to private or sensitive information that an attacker could use for malicious purposes." The methodology used to come up with this statistic has been questioned, however.

Verizon held its "Next Generation of Droid" event today, in which it unveiled the Droid X, which will be shipping on July 15th (with Android 2.1) for $199 after a $100 rebate, according to this liveblogged coverage of the event.

Nokia is reportedly ditching Symbian on its N Series devices in favor of MeeGo, with the N8 being the last Symbian device in the series.

The new Skype for Symbian software will allow more than 200 million Nokia smartphone users globally access Skype over a WiFi or mobile data connection.

Skype for Symbian will allow Nokia smartphone users to make free Skype-to-Skype calls to other Skype users, save money on international calls and texts, and share pictures and videos.

"Symbian enables us to bring smartphones to more and more people and ensures scale for our solutions and compelling services, such as Skype," Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President for Smartphones, Nokia.

"We’re seeing around 1.5 million downloads a day on Ovi Store now and believe that the Skype client for Nokia smartphones will have wide appeal to Symbian users."

Skype for Symbian will run on any Nokia smartphone using the latest version of the Symbian platform. Skype said it plans to introduce Symbian to mobile devices from other manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson.
 

The smartphone market has a constantly shifting mobile operating system (OS) landscape. In a market once ruled by BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, new players with open standards (Android) and intuitive design and navigation (Mac OS X and webOS) have received strong user and handset vendor interest.

"Mobile operating systems have become the key ingredient in the highly competitive mobile device market," said Stephen D. Drake, vice president, Mobility and Telecom.

"Although the overall look and feel of the device will still play an important role in the buying process, the wrong choice of operating system coupled with an awkward user interface can mean the difference between success and failure."

Symbian will hold onto its top spot worldwide throughout the forecast period. Due mainly to the strength of Nokia in markets outside of the United States, Symbian continues to lead all other mobile operating systems.

Android will experience the fastest growth of any mobile operating system. Starting from a small base of 690,000 units in 2008, total Android shipments will reach 68 million unites by 2013, making for a CAGR of 150.4 percent. Android will benefit from having a growing footprint of handset vendors supporting it and will finish second to Symbian in shipments by 2013.

Linux and webOS shipments will struggle throughout the forecast period. Shipments of Linux-powered devices will trend down due to greater emphasis on the Android platform but will not go away entirely as some vendors will continue to support it. Palm’s webOS, despite growing steadily, will capture limited market share due to limited deployment and availability of devices across multiple carriers.

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Adobe’s Max conference runs from October 4th through October 7th, so we can expect the release sometime between those dates.

Most of the "big boys" in the smartphone world are mentioned in the presentation: Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, WebOS and Symbian. Wait, there seems to be two smartphones missing… you know the one just sold over 1 million phones in three days. The other is very popular with business people, including the President of the United States. They both have fruit in the name.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry. Neither of the two seems to be getting Flash.

It seems that Apple doesn’t want to lose control of the app marketplace, which would definitely become more crowded if they began getting Flash & AIR apps.

As far as the other smartphones are concerned, Flash support is actually coming along a little faster than planned. Initially, the goal was to bring Flash to smartphones sometime in 2010… but with October release date, things are looking good for smartphone owners. (Except for the iPhone & Blackberry owners of course)

Nokia already owned 48% of Symbian, but is willing to pay around $410 million in cash to acquire the remaining 52%.

So, what’s Nokia’s plan for Symbian?

Nokia on Tuesday also said it and other mobile phone makers such as Motorola, Inc , LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson along with operators AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone Group  and chipmakers Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics have formed the non-profit Symbian foundation to drive innovation in mobile services.

Nokia will contribute Symbian and its S60 software assets to the foundation, while other members will put in their UIQ and MOAP software to create a new joint Symbian platform in 2009.

OK, but what’s Nokia’s real plan?

Oh I see. Well Nokia’s real plan is likely to get a head start on Google’s delayed Android, while also giving Apple’s iPhone something to think about. With cutting edge phone hardware–99.999% of Silicon Valley owns a Nokia (or at least Robert Scoble does)–combined with Symbian’s software, Nokia will make sure the mobile phone industry is not a one horse race.

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