Despite inroads by Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS, which has demonstrated success with Motorola among other handset vendors recently, ABI Research believes that Symbian will continue to lead the market for cell phone standardized operating systems. In a market that is still driven by proprietary OS, on the order of 98% this year, Symbian, Microsoft and Linux are fighting over a small portion of the total handset market. But 2% of handsets shipped - essentially all handsets defined as "Smartphones" -- still amount to about 10 million handsets a year. And ABI Research predicts that Smartphones and connected PDAs will represent nearly a quarter of all handsets shipped by 2009.
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