Just a few years ago, seeing an Indian youth with a Nokia or an office-goer with a BlackBerry device on the road was a common sight.
In 2009, about 70 per cent of smartphones sold globally had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia and the two stalwarts were going strong.
But even tech leaders can, at times, fail to gauge when a particular phenomenon can go extinct.
The mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft, which account for nearly 99 per cent of sales today, were in less than 25 per cent of mobile devices sold at that time, says a recent blog post by WhatsApp which has decided to end its support to BlackBerry phones and those powered by Nokia’s Symbian OS by the end of this year.
On the other hand, Canadian mobile company Blackberry reported a $670 million loss in the first fiscal quarter in 2016–its biggest loss in over two years.
“Similarly, Windows-based smartphones are likely to decline sharply given the fact that Nokia is no longer a part of Microsoft,” Karthik J added.
“The high-end Blackberry Priv (based on Google’s Android OS) smartphone was a drastic approach the vendor took to revive by moving away from its homegrown OS to Android but failed to create ripples in the market,” Karthik told IANS.
According to experts, Blackberry was a little late in coming up with an Android-based smartphone.
It is not just WhatsApp that decided to end support for BlackBerry OS 10 services by the end of this year. Facebook too is leaving the BlackBerry platform after announcing it will discontinue support of its application programming interfaces (APIs) for BlackBerry.
“BlackBerry needs to focus on feature phone market and concentrate when it comes to India if it wants to beat Chinese and established players in the country,” notes Vishal Tripathi, Research Director at global market consultancy firm Gartner.
When it comes to Nokia, with a proper revival approach, the Finnish company still holds a good chance to make a strong re-entry into the highly populated smartphone market in India.
According to Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst with CyberMedia Research, Windows still is the default enterprise OS and mobility is an extended piece within enterprise communications. “So there is a connect. It is only that Microsoft has to develop the solid links. There have to be compelling reasons,” he suggests.
All is not lost yet for Nokia and Blackberry, the two handset legacies of our times–if they understand the changing needs of the Next-Gen smartphone users, and act.
(This piece has been published in an arrangement with IANS.)
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