Nokia may be undergoing turbulent times at present but its devices continue to dominate application testing by developers in the EU, according to new research from DeviceAnywhere. The mobile app development and testing vendor found that Nokia handsets made up 54.1 percent of total testing time in Q2 2010. Likewise, Symbian devices dominated the smartphone space, with 64.2 percent of total EU smartphone testing time in the period. 

However, the Finnish firm fared far less well in the US, where it had just a 7.6 percent market share. On US handsets, Symbian accounted for just 4 percent of total smartphone testing time. Other major contrasts include the focus on BlackBerry and Motorola devices. In the US, developers spent 25.7 percent of overall testing time on BlackBerry devices, compared to 2.6 percent of time in Europe. And US developers spent 16.6 percent of their overall testing time on Motorola, versus 4.6 percent in Europe.

The findings are from DeviceAnywhere’s newly launched Metrics Report Europe – Summer 2010, in which the company profiled handsets offered by major operators in the UK, France, Germany and Spain. The company claims to work directly with 10,000 application developers around the world, and previously launched a Mobile Metrics US Report.

“This [European] report has shown that there are some key differences in the development and testing trends amongst our European and US customers which appears to indicate different development strategies,” commented Faraz Syed, CEO of DeviceAnywhere. “While the European handset and operating system testing data is broadly aligned with overall market shares, US developers appear to be developing for emerging players with popular application stores. With that said, it will be interesting to see what impact the introduction of additional devices based on mobile operating systems, such as the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, will have on our metrics in the future.”

Other points of note from the European report include the fact that smartphone usage accounted for 61.3 percent of testing time in Q2 2010. However the overall proportion of smartphone testing time in the region has not shifted markedly in the last twelve months, with smartphone usage at 58 percent of testing time in Q3 2009. The overall proportion of smartphone testing time is slightly larger than in the US, with US developers spending 54.7 percent of their time on smartphones in Q2 2010.

Android testing time is also on the rise. In Q2 2010, Android was the fourth most tested operating system in the EU market, after Symbian, BlackBerry OS and Microsoft Windows Mobile. The percent of time spent on Android devices out of total EU smartphone testing time rose from 1 percent in Q3 2009 to 4.9 percent in Q2 2010, a trend that DeviceAnywhere expects to continue as the number of Android handsets rises.