And those phones have a web experience worth targeting? I understand that Nokia has a lot of phones out there, but the vast majority seem only tangentially related to the discussion of smartphone apps.

It's fairly easy to kick together a "mobile" version of a site. Just use these simple CSS rules:

    img  { display: none; }
    body { hideous-eyebleach: true; }

For many phones, just having 0 style, 0 images and a few text fields is enough. Their browsers are barely capable of mediating an experience beyond that (let alone displaying it). These don't really represent a valid target for this discussion, I think.

Well, given that Nokia S60v3 browser _is_ webkit, I don't think that the results with your suggested stylesheet would be satisfactory. Would you accept it on your iphone?

If the phone is worth targetting, then target it. I'm just saying that arguing Nokia's total phone market share seems like a sort of sketchy way to extrapolate priorities for smartphone-enabled websites.

Does the Nokia S60v3 have large market share worth targeting? The reason Android and iPhone markets have such gravity is that they're large and relatively homogenous consumers of rich web content from the mobile space; maximum bang for minimum buck.

I really think that this article is just wrong, and its willingness to confuse rich-web-enabled smartphones with phones that can barely display unstyled webpages is what drives me to that conclusion.

Sorry, you're the one who's confused -- the article is quite explicit that the marketshare numbers given are for smartphones, not the entire phone market.

Except that we're talking about smartphones capable of delivering a web experience that is competent enough to be concerned about experience.

There are smartphones and then there are post-2006-smartphones, which actually do real web browsing. I strongly suspect that Nokias numbers here include many phones less capable than the one that was raised in objection previously. Is there independent evidence to the contrary?