Worldwide Handset Sales up 35% in Q3 with Android as Biggest Winner
Date: November 17, 2010 | No Comments
According to a report released by Gartner this week, global mobile sales have increased 35% from the third quarter of 2009, reaching 417M units. Nokia is still the largest manufacturer globally, having shipped 117M devices, but their market share is down to 28.2% from 36.7% a year ago. Korean manufacturers Samsung and LG are in second and third place, respectively, while Apple has now surpassed RIM to become the fourth largest manufacturer. Other than Apple, HTC was the only other manufacturer in the top 10 to increase their market share.
The smartphone segment experienced an astonishing growth rate of 96% over last year, with Symbian still being the most widely used OS, followed closely by Google’s Android.
Tarifica’s Take
Tarifica has reported on the rise of Android during the past year and anticipates that Google’s mobile operating system will become the most popular option for smartphones in the near future.
Android has a significant competitive advantage over the other three top operating systems (Symbian, iOS and RIM) as it is not attached to specific hardware. While Nokia, Apple and Blackberry are developing software for their own devices, Android keeps its platform open for all manufacturers, and almost every other mobile manufacturer is using it, despite the fact that most of them also offer models that run under different versions of Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc…
This situation resembles what happened 20 years ago with the popularization of personal computers. Apple’s strategy of selling their operating system only bundled with the Mac PC led to Microsoft’s Windows becoming the most popular operating system, as it was compatible with any manufacturer’s hardware. As a result, software developers focused on developing applications for Windows due to its larger user base, and the company achieved a market share close to monopoly levels. Now, with all the hardware manufacturers focused on developing more competitive Android phones, we can also expect that most applications developers will turn their attention to building more Android applications. Over the next few years, this could lead to Android attaining dominance in the mobile OS space, just was Windows achieved in desktop OS.
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