Symbian

According to research firm Canalys, 32.9% of the smartphones shipped from manufacturers during the fourth quarter of 2010 ran Android, making it the number one smartphone platform world wide. The news is significant because it means that for the first time after a decade, Nokia, who is credited for bringing to market the first smartphone, is not the leader. Nokia smartphones accounted for 30.6% of the devices shipped during the quarter.

Google and Nokia have sizable leads worldwide over it’s competitors. Apple is in third place with 16% of the smartphones shipped. In terms of smartphones shipped in the U.S., RIM reclaimed first place from Apple, with Canalys citing that it benefited from the first full quarter of shipments of the Blackberry Torch. U.S. numbers will likely change soon after Verizon starts selling the iPhone. For the year nearly 300 million smartphones were shipped, which is an 80% increase from 2009.

Bear in mind that Canalys’ data represents shipments from manufacturing plants and is not actual sales to consumers. Still, the data pretty much meets the expectation that Android would become the top smartphone platform given the number of manufacturers making Android handsets and the number of carriers selling them.

The news must be particularly troubling to Nokia, with news sites like Reuters emphasizing how Google has moved past them. Nokia will be presenting at Mobile World Congress on February 13, so perhaps they will provide insights on how they plan to wrestle market share back from Google.

If you own a phone that runs Symbian or Windows Mobile, and you plan to replace it with a phone that runs Android, you might want to consider the SPB Migration Tool. The combination of application and service will migrate contacts, text messages, call history, and bookmarks to a phone running Android 2.1 or newer. Source phones must be running either Symbian S60 3rd edition or later, or Windows Mobile 5 or later.

SPB Migration Tool provides two ways to migrate data, a web migration or storage card migration. Web migration involves installing an app on the source phone, which securely transfers data to SPB’s servers, where an app running on the target phone retrieves the data to populate on the target phone.

Storage card migration requires that the source and target phones support the same type of storage card. You first prep the storage card on the Android phone, which installs an app on the card that you then run on the source phone. The app then captures the data on the source phone, after which you insert the card into the target phone, run the app again, and restore the data onto the target phone.

The entire migration process is guided by the web site migratetoandroid.com, which you can check out for more information about how the process works. One drawback is that the app costs $9.95, which I think is bit expensive for a one time use application and service, but you can determine whether the data on your old phone is valuable enough to transfer with this tool.