The latest figures from Gartner highlight some impressive movement for the Android platform and some not so impressive trends for the likes of Nokia.
Android is up a full 15.4% market share from only 1.8% last year and almost every other mobile OS has taken a hit because of it. iOS is up 1.2% at 14.2%, but the iPhone 4 would not have had any impact on these figures.
Symbian is down from 51% to 41.2% which must be a concern for Nokia and it is the first time that its percentage has dropped so markedly. RIM is down 0.8% at 18.2% which may, or may not, be a cause for concern and Windows Mobile has taken another expected drop from 9.3% to 5%. webOS is sadly nowhere to be seen.
From Gartner- “In the second quarter of 2010, Nokia’s mobile device sales to end users reached 111.5 million units and a share of 34.2 percent. Nokia’s economies of sales and excellent distribution enabled it to hold onto the top spot in the mobile device market. But good quality, well-priced products were not enough to maintain Nokia’s leadership in the high-end sector. This caused Nokia to lose 2.6 percentage points year-on-year. Nokia’s senior executives need to do more to attract developers and other ecosystem members by revising its platform strategy and improving its communications.
Samsung sold 65.3 million devices in the second quarter of 2010 that translated into a 20.1 percent market share. Although Samsung’s sales were strong in developing markets, its shift in product mix caused an overall decline in ASP. Samsung maintained its position in the midtier by launching several new devices, including messaging handsets. This more aggressive strategy toward the mass market enabled it to reduce inventory in the second quarter of 2010. Samsung will also be one of the first manufacturers to bring Windows Phone 7 devices to market, in time for the fourth quarter of 2010, showing that this manufacturer continues to keep its platform options open, even as it works on its own bada platform.
Research In Motion (RIM)’s mobile device sales to end users reached 11.2 million units in the second quarter of 2010, confirming RIM’s position as the fourth largest brand with a share of 3.4 percent this quarter. New devices running BlackBerry OS 6.0 — such as RIM’s first touchscreen qwerty slider, the Torch — will be available from the third quarter of 2010. We believe the Torch’s form factor will still appeal more to business users than to consumers and will stop many loyal BlackBerry users defecting to other platforms, but it won’t attract many new users to the brand.
Apple’s mobile device sales reached 8.7 million units or a 2.7 percent share of the overall mobile device market, but a 14.2 percent of the smartphone market. Apple maintained its No. 7 position in the worldwide mobile device market and held the No. 3 position in the worldwide smartphone market. Apple’s sales would have been higher if it had not had to face tight inventory management in preparation for the arrival of the iPhone 4 at the end of the second quarter of 2010. Apple also suffered from some supply constraint on the new device. We expect that a wider global rollout of iPhone 4 will sustain Apple’s sales momentum throughout the second half of 2010.
In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Android expanded rapidly in the second quarter of 2010, overtaking Apple’s iPhone OS to become the third-most-popular OS in the world (see Table 2). In the U.S, it also overtook RIM’s OS to become the No. 1 smartphone OS in this region. “A non-exclusive strategy that produces products selling across many communication service providers (CSPs), and the backing of so many device manufacturers, which are bringing more attractive devices to market at several different price points, were among the factors that yielded its growth this quarter,” said Ms. Milanesi.
Smartphone sales to end users totaled 61.6 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 50.5 percent increase from the same period in 2009. The top four smartphone OS vendors exhibited growth in the second quarter of 2010, and accounted for 91 percent of the worldwide smartphone OS market, up 6 percent year-on-year.”
Sitting on the tube yesterday opposite 2 little girls, probably no more than 10 years old, who both had Sony X10s. (must have rich parents!) Don’t know if they knew if they had Android devices in their hands or if they even knew what Android was.
It made me wonder how many people consciously buy a phone because it is Android as opposed to buying it because it is, say, a Sony. I wonder what percentage of people even know that their phone is running Android.
Visited an old friend the other day, and she had her HTC Legent jam packed with Family Guy stuff… She loves Family Guy and the “applications” basically say various quotes from different characters which you can then set as ring tones etc. There the famous farting app, and some games. She did use voice guided gps on it which she said she loved and has made moving to a new part of the country much easier. She also used Facebook and the Internet a lot. She did know she was using Android, and she was using it the way she enjoyed.