As reported earlier, Nokia has announced a new family of smartphones powered by the Symbian platform. The Nokia E7, C7 and C6 join the previously announced N8.
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.