The guru jumps...but where?

Last night I wrote a two-post series, in which the second post mentioned that the leading smartphone platform in the world is the Symbian platform. (And then I went on to note that dumbphones still outnumber smartphones by a longshot.) The post also notes that Symbian has not really taken off here in the United States.

Jake Kuramoto posted something today about the market for apps on smartphones, and in the course of a comment on the post he suggested that I check something out:

Re. Symbian, it's got issues. Check out the Symbian-Guru's rant and points on why he's quitting and going Android...

So I went to the post, which was written on July 1. (We'll return to that in a minute.)

As of today, I will no longer be updating Symbian-Guru.com, and will be purchasing an Android-powered smartphone....

Why?

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.

I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia’s own employees don’t use. I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.

The Guru noted that one of the issues was apps:

What’s worse is that developers of popular online services are completely ignoring Symbian, putting it further and further behind the other platforms. To date, there is still not an official client for Dropbox, Pandora, Last.FM (don’t get me wrong, Mobbler is one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Symbian, but it’s still not official), Foursquare, Twitter, and a host of others. Yes, there are solutions to this on Symbian, but nearly every other platform has an *official* client from these popular services – showing that the developers see those platforms as something their users would actually be using.

But there's an interesting side story to this whole thing. As I mentioned, the Symbian Guru posted this on July 1, and he also stated which Android phone he was getting.

...my new Nexus One should arrive tomorrow

A couple of weeks after the Symbian Guru (the Android Guru?) received his Nexus One phone, it was discontinued in the United States. Obviously there are other Android phones out there, but what does this mean? Mashable notes the significance:

This is the end of [Google's] grand experiment with an unlocked consumer handset in the U.S.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

[AN FCC DISCLOSURE IS IN ORDER. I AM A FORMER EMPLOYEE OF MOTOROLA, A NOKIA COMPETITOR, THOUGH NOT IN MOTOROLA'S CELLPHONE DIVISION.]