Nokia's Symbian operating system is still the dominant smartphone platform worldwide. Symbian has 37 percent of the smartphone market, followed by Android with 26 percent, according to a report from research firm Gartner.  Yet, Nokia, which all but dominated the U.S. cell phone market early on, has barely a presence here these days in the expanding smartphone sector.  "There's a different way of doing business here," Linardos said.  Part of that has to do with the advertising machine. Apple puts all of its marketing might behind one name, the iPhone. Verizon Wireless, too, has a calculated approach that involves putting its ad dollars into one Droid at a time.  Linardos appears to hold some resentment about Nokia innovations he believes have been aped by competitors, who end up getting the credit because they "make a better commercial," he said.  A laundry list of reasons could be given for why Nokia has fallen so far behind in the United States and is ceding market share in other countries.  "They started with a blank whiteboard," Linardos said of Apple and Google. "So it's not really apples to apples in that sense."  Nokia has been in the smartphone game for a while. Microsoft, another early competitor in that space with Windows Mobile, has also struggled to adapt, but it made a big shift this month with Windows Phone 7.  So the team behind Symbian, which looks like a mix of Android and Windows XP, has turned its focus toward third-party developers. That app economy has been a big driver of interest in the iPhone, with Apple even devoting a large ad campaign to that aspect of the system.  Linardos, who oversees Nokia's Ovi app store, is implementing his ideas for fixing what he considers a flawed App Store model pioneered by Apple.  "In other stores like iTunes, you're easily lost in the crowd," he said.
Nokia is still the Titanic of the cell phone world, but in the past few years the Finnish company is having to steer around a lot more icebergs.The ocean of competition has transformed dramatically,