Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer, has lost the position of top smartphone platform maker that they had for 10 years. Google is now the leading smartphone platform maker followed by Nokia and Apple. The research firm Canalys published this survey on Monday reporting that 32.9 million handsets are running on Google platform.

[image via AppleInsider]

About 5 years ago Nokia was an icon in the smartphones industry and I believe it was their best time. I remember when Symbian looked so awesome. The variety of phones that Nokia suites every class of buyers and Nokia is still the largest mobile phone manufacturer. But when it comes to smartphones, Nokia has lost it.

Today, the operating system and user experience of a smartphone is the key to customer’s interest. This revolution was started by Apple’s iPhone when iPhone OS (Now called the iOS) blew away everyone not only because of a very sophisticated/magical user experience but also the possibilities for developers to make appealing applications and selling them on the Apple App store. The iPhone App Store is a gold rush for developers. The first iPhone didn’t even have multitasking and some other features that Nokia smartphones offered at that time but what led the iPhone to revolutionize the smartphone industry was the user experience and the bond with developers for developing apps for the App Store. Nokia made their touch screen phones better but failed to impress that much. Then Google jumped in with Android, it was not truly loved when the first version was released but it got mature by time and became a very powerful open source operating system for smartphones.

If we compare Symbian with Android, Android is far more powerful and has very good performance on devices. Nokia has failed to make Symbian a better platform. There are performance lags. Nokia tried to make things better by providing developers with the OVI store but that didn’t help much because as far as there is Symbian, the apps on Nokia have failed to ‘look and feel’ better than those on Android and iOS. Nokia’s latest flagship device N8 offers great hardware and around 4 million units were sold but that isn’t enough. Nokia needs a better platform than Symbian. Nokia has lost a big market share, one of the noticeable disappointment in Nokia’s fanboyism is the owner of Symbian-Guru who published a blog post on July 1, 2010 announcing that he won’t be updating this site anymore and has ordered Google’s Nexus One that he will be using in future. He said:

“As of today, I will no longer be updating Symbian-Guru.com, and will be purchasing an Android-powered smartphone – my new Nexus One should arrive tomorrow. I’ve been a Nokia fanboy since 1999, and a Symbian fanboy since I got my Nokia 6620 in summer of 2004. Since then, I’ve personally owned 10+ different Symbian-powered smartphones, and have reviewed nearly every Symbian-powered smartphone that’s been released in the past 3 years or so. I’ve tried to use all of Nokia’s various products and services to the best of my ability, and I just can’t do it anymore.” [Read full post]

Nokia has planned to have MeeGo OS on their future devices maybe because they have realized that they can’t take Symbian further if they want to stay top in the current smartphone market.