Google needs a carrier partner because carriers control the U.S. mobile market. Symbian is not a player of any consequence in the U.S. market (with approximately a 5% market share), while Microsoft has somewhere around 1/3 of the smartphone market. So, with my U.S. market blinders on, Symbian is irrelevant. Honestly I’ve never even seen a Symbian phone outside of a trade show booth. They just don’t matter here.

Outside the U.S., Symbian appears to dominate, but I’m not sure whether that puts them in a position to use relationships with carriers, handset makers (Nokia, really), or network operators to defend against competition. My guess is, it does not.

Yes, I didn’t explicitly say this but I was thinking it when I mentioned Google’s potential to bypass the “network folks”. But owning spectrum doesn’t take care of retail, marketing, billing, building out the cell tower network, etc. That’s a very big job with competitors who are far more experienced and entrenched than Google.