Just a year ago, Android handsets accounted for a slim 8.7 percent of the global smartphone market, with OS vendors such as Nokia, RIM, and Apple well in the lead, according to an industry survey. Not anymore. Also: Android establishes a beachhead in the tablet market.
We've already been hearing plenty of reports about how Google's Android OS has been surging in the domestic and worldwide smartphone marketplaces, but the latest figures from the industry analysts at Canalys put the new mobile platform landscape on stark perspective, with Android sales seeing an extraordinary, 615-percent growth spurt in 2010 to topple Nokia's Symbian platform off its throne.
As of the end of the fourth quarter last year, Android enjoyed a 33.3 percent share of the global smartphone market, according to Canalys, with Nokia's Symbian OS trailing (just barely) at 31 percent.
Mind you, Nokia still ranks as the No. 1 global manufacturer of smartphones, the survey noted, with the Finnish phone giant seeing worldwide shipments of its smart handsets grow 30 percent in 12 months.
But that wasn't enough to stop Android, which saw its global market share kick in the afterburners with help from a veritable gang of smartphone makers—think HTC, Samsung, LG, and Acer, according to Canalys.
After Nokia comes Apple, which saw its fourth-quarter 2010 global iOS market share dip ever so slightly to 16.2 percent, from 16.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009—although as with Nokia, Apple still saw a healthy surge in global sales (up nearly 86 percent compared to the fourth quarter of '08).
In fourth place, we've got BlackBerry maker RIM with 14.6 percent of the global smartphone market, down more than five percent from the year-ago 2009 period, while Microsoft saw its fourth-quarter 2010 market share slump to 3.1 percent.
Narrowing our focus to the U.S. market, the contest for the top smartphone OS really wasn't one, with a new NPD Group survey crowning Android the crown last quarter with a whopping 53 percent slice of the domestic pie.
Far behind in terms of smartphone platforms was Apple with a 19 percent share, according to NPD. Apple still had the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. last quarter with the iPhone 4, but a trio of Android handsets were nipping at the iPhone's heels: the Motorola Droid X, the HTC Evo 4G, and the Motorola Droid 2.
RIM was tied for second with 19 percent of the U.S. smartphone market last quarter, NPD said, with the old Windows Mobile OS at 4 percent and the new Windows Phone 7 platform at just 2 percent.
Meanwhile, Android isn't just surging in the smartphone department, with researchers at Strategy Analytics reporting (via Bloomberg) that Android-based tablets grabbed a 22-percent share of the worldwide tablet market last quarter, up from a mere 2.3 percent the previous quarter.
That's still far behind Apple's 75-percent global tablet share last quarter, but consider this: Apple's tablet share in the third quarter of 2010 was a dominant 95 percent, meaning that Android managed to take a serious chomp out of Apple's share of the slate market.
But while Android may be gaining ground on Apple's tablet market share—and eclipsing it in terms of smartphones—it's important to keep in mind that almost all the big mobile OSes are moving more devices (many more, in some cases) than they were a year ago.
For example, Apple saw its tablet sales surge an eye-popping 74 percent between the third quarter of 2010 and last quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, even as Android tablet sales soared to 2.1 million units from just 100,000 in the same period.
Same goes for smartphones, with only Mircosoft selling fewer smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2010 than it did during the year-prior period, according to the Canalys survey. Indeed, overall smartphone sales nearly doubled from 53.7 million units to 101.2 million handsets.
In other words: even if Android's piece of the mobile pie is bigger than Apple's, or Nokia's, or RIM's, the overall slices are getting bigger—a lot bigger. For us consumers, that's a good thing.
Source: Yahoo News
Source: Yahoo News
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